GTK on FSO (was: Community Initiative GTK)

[Knight Walker]

As a long-time Linux user, I have an emotional attachment to GTK+
that ... um ... transcends reason. And primarily for that reason, I
would like to see the "old" GTK+ interfaces (often called "GTK software
stack" or "2007.2 stack") maintained. I will even be helping where and
how I can (Though I can't make solid commitments).

After reading a lot on the Community and Devel mailing lists, it seems
like the primary thing that needs to be done (At this point) is for the
GTK Dialer and Preferences (and things like SMS handling, SIM access,
and others) to be ported to the FreeSmartphone.Org (FSO) framework,
which basically entails ripping out the guts of those programs and
replacing them with a bunch of DBus calls to the existing (And future)
FSO daemons (Parts of the E17/EFL/QtX11 "ASU" will require similar work
if it hasn't been completed yet).

Thus far, it looks like FSO primarily defines a Device API
(getting/setting device settings, triggering/waking-from suspend, etc),
an Event API (Not yet documented), a Usage API (not yet documented), a
Preferences API (Profiles and such), and a Telephony API (This is the
spec that's received the most work to-date) which includes things like
call handling, SMS, GSM network information and operations, and SIM-card
access.

It looks like their Wiki has stubs for higher-level things like PIM,
networking, Bluetooth, audio, etc. and I am eager to see what they come
up with for these, as that spec will permeate the entire mobile software
stack. However, I predict (I'm going out on a limb here) that these will
be very difficult subjects to target and will require extensive work
(just PIM is an area with several books' worth of discussion and
disagreement).

Honestly, once FSO stabilizes, it should be easy to write GTK, QT, EFL,
Curses, etc interfaces for the phone systems as all you need is a DBus
connection.

-KW