[SharpOS Developers] about sharpws / keymap (2nd attempt)

[Sander v. R. <san...@gm...>]

Odd... i send this email to the mailing list a couple of days ago..
but it never returned to me (is that normal behaviour?)
On the other hand i can see the title of the mail on the sourceforge
mailing list page, but the mail itself doesn't show up when i click it
and browse trough all the emails... weird huh?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sander van Rossen <san...@gm...>
Date: Aug 28, 2007 4:09 PM
Subject: sharpws / keymap etc.
To: Sha...@li...


I've been working at a client the last month and things have been way
too busy for me to contribute to sharpos.. (or give enough attention
to my family)
but from next week on (i hope) i'll have more time to spend on sharpos
once again.
(and my family ;))



I noticed the complete overhaul in the repository.. wow, lots of changes
looks good :)
too bad it doesn't run too well tough :-/
but i guess that will be fixed soon..



I spend a little time on sharpws, cleaned things a bit up so that it
actually compiles ;)
still doesn't run tough.
I was thinking tough.. right now sharpws has a library called sharpws
and an executable called sharpws-server..
now it's not entirely clear, but it looks like the library has some
client and common code..
maybe it's better to have 3 parts instead of 2;
the client, the server and the host.

The host is basically the actuall machine, the hardware if you will..
here are all the things that the client / server have in common and
where they get all their resources from.
The client and server parts only handle the protocol part of it all basically.

This way it should also be simpler to have multiple servers and
multiple clients, which could be usefull at some point.

I'm also really concerned about font rendering, i did a bit of
research into it a while ago and to say it's complicated is an
understatement.. it's a whole research field on it's own!
I think it's best to use bitmapped fonts for a while, and maybe
eventually try to port (eek!) something like freetype to get proper
font rendering working..



Also, i looked at the keymapping part and i realized that besides
numlock mode is basically more or less the same (from a keymapping
pov) as capslock mode.
Also, the meanings of some keys are also different when you press
ctrl, like pause/break etc.

Which just makes me feel that key maps might need to be more flexible
and handle as much 'modes' as they need.
I haven't put much tought in it tough, just made the observation.



I'm sure you all the papers on singularity, they have some interesting
ideas on having driver manifests that define which ports/irq/dma's
etc. the drivers use..
Which helps automatically check at install time if drivers would have
conflicts, and helps port/irq/dma resource management..
Shouldn't be too hard to implement something simular using stubs and
attributes..