Dear list,
To reflect on this year's progress, its been a pleasure to watch the Genode desktop evolve from a ramshackle init configuration into Sculpt and the launcher system. The lack of interest from the outside world is disappointing, but I blame a pessimistic zeitgeist rather than the lameness of Genode.
As for concrete goals for next year, I have one laptop that I use exclusively with Sculpt, but I also have a NixOS VPS that I use as my always-on OS. Therefore I would like a headless Sculpt that I can use remotely. For this to happen I would imagine a nested sculpt_manager so that I could share the same machine with friends, a Curses-like implementation of menu_view, and some secure networking tunneling.
Its my perception that the greatest impedement to new users and contributers is the singular C++ system API. Perhaps additional Sculpt shells could be implemented in interpreted languages such as Python or Lisp. I've known a few "power-users" that would appreciate booting into their favorite language intepreter, but couldn't care less about how to use Bash. Python seems the surest choice, the digital artists I know work with Python and there was a time when I used IPython daily.
As for my personal roadmap, in the past few weeks I've begun work on a distributed non-hierarchal storage layer. The intention is to support a subset of the de facto file-system semantics with quick composition using the formalism of set logic. This is a pivot of my roadmap from a year ago and reuses code and ideas from another storage project of mine, so progress is swift. The use-case is distributed and redundant storage for things like my permanent music collection as well as the package depot.
Best wishes for next year, Emery