README
======

PerlPanel is an attempt to build a useable, lean panel program (like
Gnome's gnome-panel and KDE's Kicker) in Perl, using Gtk2. There are
several reasons for this:

	1. I really enjoy programming with Gtk and Perl. It's neat.
	2. Using a popular language like Perl lowers the barrier to entry,
	   so a lot more people can contribute.
	3. It makes C purists go a funny shade of purple.
	4. Because there's nothing like it at the moment.
	5. Perl's built-in garbage collection and optimisation means that
	   it may well perform better on low-end systems than similar programs.

A few tenets:

	1. Everything is OO.
	2. Gnome is neat, but not everyone likes Gnome. So we avoid using it
	   and stick to pure Gtk¹.
	3. All config is stored in XML.
	4. Sane defaults. Not everyone wants a CPU/eth meter by default.
	5. Everything is subject to debate. If something is broken in the
	   panel/applet/config systems, then we can fix it. I can't imagine
	   a normal user will want to use PerlPanel for a long time, so
	   breaking compatability between versions is no problem.

A few wahs, or, TODO:

	1. At the moment the Panel is nothing more than a packing box in
	   a popup window that's been warped into a rectangle. This will
	   probably raise havoc with a lot of things. There's probably a
	   way to do it "properly" using Gdk but that's beyond my
	   experience. Feel free to correct this with a patch :-)
	2. No I18N yet.

¹: We use the Gnome2::Wnck library for the tasklist, show desktop
button and pager. However this module doesn't require the rest of the
Gnome2 bundle - it's just named that way because it's a Gnome package.

--
$Id: README,v 1.7 2003/10/12 16:22:17 jodrell Exp $
