						2001-08-25
						Emil Brink

			gentoo v0.11.17

INTRODUCTION
gentoo is a graphical file managment program, written from
scratch in C. It uses the GTK+ toolkit for its interface.
gentoo is developed and tested primarily under Linux, but is
known to compile and work on many other Unix-like operating
systems as well.
	One of the design goals with gentoo has been to provide
extensive customization and configuration abilities, and to do
so from an integrated, graphic, interface. The user should not
have to edit the configuration file directly "by hand", and
especially not have to restart the program for changes to take
effect.
	gentoo features a fairly complex and powerful system
for file type recognition, coupled to an object-oriented style
system, which together give you a lot of control over how files
of different types are displayed and acted upon.


LICENSING
This software is copyright (c) 1998-2001 by Emil Brink.
	You are free to distribute this software under the terms
of the GNU General Public License, version 2. You should have
received a copy of this license together with the software (in a
file called COPYING). If not, and you have web access, check
<http://www.gnu.org>.
	It is important to realize that this software comes
without any warranty whatsoever.


THE AUTHOR
gentoo was written by Emil Brink. It is my first program to use
GTK+, my first major Linux application, and my first program
released in source form under the GPL, but it's absolutely _not_
my first program. ;^) I've been hacking since the late eighties,
and am currently a studying for a Master of Science in computer
science at the Royal Institute of Technology ("RIoT") here in
Stockholm, Sweden.
	Work on gentoo started in May 1998, when I decided it
would be fun to learn the GTK+ interface toolkit. The first
actual release of gentoo was called version 0.9.0, and made
its public appearance back in September 1998.
	Please send questions, answers, bug reports, praise (?)
and critique straight to <emil@obsession.se>. I am listening.
Also, please do try to include the word "gentoo" in the subject
of your e-mail, to help me manage my e-mail.


RELEASE NOTES
This release introduces autoconfiguration build support in
gentoo, which really is long overdue. Many thanks are due to
Andreas Kloeckner for providing the help I needed to get this
going. I've picked up a clue or two about autoconf since, from
working on another project. But Andreas got me going with
gentoo, which is very much appreciated. The autoconf support
actually delivered is very primitive, and woefully underused.
Many of the required checks are hard to write without access
to more systems. If you can help, please get in touch.
	On the actual user-visible feature side, this release
doesn't add anything major. I'm pretty pleased with the new
pane split tracking code, though. It, too, is long overdue.
It was held back by my failing to see the hoops in GTK+ that
one needs to jump through to get it going.
	The ChMod command is now more useful, since it can
now actually clear the 'x' flag on a tree without shooting
itself in the foot.
	There's now a project registered at SourceForge for
gentoo. You can use the bug reporting interface over there,
at <http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/gentoo/>, to report
bugs if you don't feel like mailing them straight to me.
	Internationalization support is still not done. The
code should be more or less ready, but I need to tweak the
installation procedure further. I took out the Swedish trans-
lation since it's not being used anyway. Be patient. :)


FOR MORE INFORMATION...
* Information about system requirements and instructions about
  how to build an executable are provided in the file INSTALL,
  as usual.
* For (sometimes very technical and close-to-the-source) notes
  on exactly what's happened in this release, check out the
  NEWS file. I recommend reading it on each new release.
* Details about gentoo's support for GUI customization through
  the use of GTK+ RC files are in the README.gtkrc file.
* For information about known problems, quirks and general
  developer headaches, please see the BUGS file.
* There is a TODO file, containing a few major things I have
  planned/want to see implemented.


DOCUMENTATION
The documentation that is available is incomplete and sort of
out of date. I'm sorry about that. Hopefully, I will find the
time and energy in the future to do a complete rewrite of the
documentation, since much has changed and been added since it
was written.
	There is a short manpage that touches the bare essentials,
in "docs/gentoo.1x". Please read it.
	There is some reasonably modern documentation in plain
text format in some files in "docs/scratch/". Read those, too.

/Emil
