Roadmap 2019

[Emery Hemingway]

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