Diffstat
| -rw-r--r-- | HACKING | 95 |
1 files changed, 0 insertions, 95 deletions
diff --git a/HACKING b/HACKING deleted file mode 100644 index 685ee6b..0000000 --- a/HACKING +++ b/dev/null @@ -1,95 +0,0 @@ -Tips and pointers (*berylhackingtips): - -* A very small portion of beryl is the actual OpenGL magic, most of working - with plugins is manipulating the main data structures (CompScreen, - CompWindow) and working with Callbacks, core is a different beast. - Appropriate data structures are more important than impressive algorithms! - -* IPCS can be used for communication between plugins see - beryl-core/src/ipcs.c and Cube/Rotate for good examples. Avoid use of this - however as it is both slow and ties plugins together in ways you may not - wish. - -* Premature optimization is the root of all evil, profile before needlessly - wasting time on optimization. To profile beryl you can compile with -pg - (CFLAGS="-pg" ./configure; make; blabla) and when beryl exits it drops a - 'gmon.out' in it's working directory. From that directory run gprof - /path/to/beryl/executable > berylprof, and you can view the profile in a - text editor, or a profile tool such as kprof (highly recommended). - -* WRAP/UNWRAP works a bit like a stack of sorts, examine a backtrace from gdb - to make things clear. This is relatively inflexible and ideas for - improvement post 0.2.0 are welcome. - -* Beryl can be debugged without crashing your system, compile with debugging - symbols (-g) and run in a tty with gdb beryl, set breakpoints with 'break - function' run with 'run' when X freezes because of the break use - alt+sysrq+r then ctrl+alt+f1 to get to the tty, examine things, and - continue execution. - -* Tieing things whether it be plugins, settings/core, or settings/an - individual plugin is bad and should be avoided. 'Write (programs) to do one - thing and do it well'. - -* As a rule avoid pixel shaders as they aren't exposed by AIGLX as of - current. Ala water. - -* Plugins should work within core, at the same time changes to core can be - made to accomadate a specific feature such as transparent cube. - -TODO: - -* Optimizations are always welcome, benchmark isn't horribly accurate but if - you consistently notice a ~10-20 FPS improvement, or a decrease in lag - spikes , or something that's not '1 FPS more when rotating cube left' go - ahead and commit it, worst case is it's reverted. Things to look at: - Switcher, particle system in animation, input enabled zoom. - -* A keybinding to replace windows (run through placement algorithm again) - would be an easy to implement and useful feature. Bonus points if the - windows fly to their new positions. - -* Comment code! not only does this help everyone in their tasks it helps you - learn the codebase, pretty easy to do. - -* Allow annotate to draw directly on to the window texture. This would involve - procing drawWindowTexture as in beryl-plugins/src/neg.c and binding an - opengl rendering context to the windows GLXPixmap, beyond that it's pretty - similar to the rest of annotate. - -* Improve plugin short descriptions, maybe make long descriptions a bit more - wordy as well as they are being moved to tooltips. - -* Anyway to speed up IPCS? - -* Refactor some of the code in place, it's spaghetti code as it stands. - -* Exempt specific windows from window decorations as part of the emerald menu. - Remember this setting for windows? look at all kwin has for stuff like this, - duplicating a small amount would be nice. - -* Contribute to I18N - -* Work on kberylsettings the PyQT settings manager in branches. - -* Add CompOptionFont to settings - -* Look for functions that can be inlined. use __attribute__((always_inline)) to - force the inline even without -finline-functions - -* Look at using LIKELY/UNLIKELY macros for if/else statements in tight loops - with a high discrimination towards one or the other. Profile to find such - areas, premature optimization is bad. - -* Participate in discussion and planning on IRC, it's invaluable. Make yourself - a part of the beryl development community rather than a lone wolf. - -* Take lengthy discussions on the mailinglist. - -* Add more code documentation in Documentation/ about interfaces used by Beryl. - -* Look in Documentation/TODO-Multiscreen for multiscreen bugs to fix during - 0.3.x - -* Add more stuff here! - |