Dream Puppy

What features/apps/bugfixes needed in a future Puppy
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kethd
Posts: 451
Joined: Thu 20 Oct 2005, 12:54
Location: Boston MA USA

Dream Puppy

#1 Post by kethd »

Dream Puppy
(inspiration Nov2005 - transcription 9dec05)

The Puppy of my dreams would be infinitely adaptable, flexible, modular -- an eager-to-please GumbyPup that would help you go as far you wanted in any direction.

KEY DESIGN GOALS

Look and Feel:
* GUI -- User Interface changeable/configurable/choosable
* Languages -- all 100+, choosable, multi-, auto-translate, etc
* Adaptive
All communication needs/preferences -- font size/color, mouse/cursor, keyboard mappings and special keyboards, hands-free modes, text-to-speech, voice input, etc

Modular
Very easy to add or remove any modules by just clicking some choice boxes, or choosing some available module bunches, themes, etc, all cross-dependencies handled automatically, minimal understanding required. Can not only generate a complete spectrum of Puppies from a 5MB command-line-only barebones or GUI embryo to a 500MB SuperPup, but all standard versions would retain the ability to dynamically add and remove modules.

Context-Sensitive Help
Wherever you are in Puppy, whatever your level of knowledge/ability, there should be very standard and obvious ways to find out, Where are you, What are the options, What is going on here -- to learn as much as you want, in a focused appropriate way.

Total Infrastructure Transparency
Be able to view/edit/change/re-compile any aspect of Puppy. With maximum hand-holding and minimum ability required, so that it is as painless as possible to get started understanding the internals, and smoothly learn as much as you want. This would be built on great tools for tracing/showing how Puppy is working. Full Puppy sources readily available, with full auto-build scripts (including all the sources for all the tools used). Standard PuppyDVD containing Everything including the whole current Forum and wiki. (And of course, Dream Puppy would be its own development platform.)

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This "Pie in the Sky Puppy" vision is relatively unencumbered by the thought process; I don't know enough about Puppy, Linux, or contemporary computer science to be well-informed (or limited by what is practical). Obviously, we are dealing with serious trade-offs in terms of size and memory resources, even assuming we have infinite genius and energy for trying to be all things to all people.

But I am hoping it might be possible to retain a compact standard Puppy less than 100MB that is so modular that it can achieve all of the above functionality by either active Intenet linkage, installable add-ons, or downloaded external data structures.

For example, let's imagine that almost all Puppies, however compacted, retain some minimal amount of symbolic modular headers in the binary, so it is possible at any point to get some kind of traceback of the current state that is not just hexcode. As long as that is there, the ability to interpret that information, in endless helpful ways, could be a smallish StandardPup module which could access giant data structures (and additional processing) on the Internet, or some parts of that database could be downloaded locally or optionally installed.

And perhaps the same concept would be workable in a similar fashion for user-mode context-sensitive help. As long as there was some minimal way to detect what was installed/running on that Puppy, what was on the screen, and where the cursor was, there could be an immensely powerful Internet-based help system, or it could be downloaded/installed locally in varying degrees.

Anyway, I'm hopeful that I'll learn enough about Puppy over the next year or two to be able to try to help some of this happen.

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