Re: Sanity Adding Apps to the Desktop

[Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas urgent rug ac be>]

Hi,

> There is a element of survival of the fittest in open source
> and I think it's too early to see which IM client will come out on top.
> We can't seriously concider adding a client almost none of us have ever
> used can we?
> 
> What ever happend to patience and doing things the "right way"?
> Lets try to have some forsight and wait a while instead of 
> doing something we might regret later.

I second that.  AFAICT, Gnome 2.0 was all about redesigning things the 
right way and making the right decisions based on long-term prospects.
We shouldn't start scrambling and putting in stuff that will lock us later 
on if we're not ready for the consequences.

As for GStreamer, I hear some people complain about it's performance on 
video.  I'd like to remind everyone that we (the GStreamer team) had 
decided and worked on providing the features that were necessary for the 
applications that made it into the GNOME desktop.  Those are 
gnome-sound-recorder and nautilus-media.  Both seem to function pretty 
well or are relatively unused based on the number of bug-reports we got 
for them.  In any case, for all we know, we're doing very well in our 
desktop adventure.

The "video" part of GStreamer was never intended to be stable in the GNOME 
2.2 timeframe, and maybe not even in the 2.4 timeframe.  It depends on 
what people want.  But whatever the reason, it's pretty much unfair to 
judge GStreamer's inclusion into the platform based on it's video 
performance looking at an app that is pretty much only runnable from CVS.

I'm not even going into the debate on totem vs. xine, because I'm biased.  
I'm just saying that the following type of mails:
- "A works for me and B doesn't"
- "GStreamer sucks because it doesn't do video properly"
are pretty useless.

What we (the GStreamer team) WOULD like however instead, is 
- useful bug reports
- exotic hardware testers
- someone HIGgy working with us to guide us in UI design
- suggestions as to what features YOU guys would want to provide in the 
core GNOME desktop that we could work on.

I personally think GStreamer 0.6.x is completely in it's place in the 
Gnome desktop, and I am excited about people finally looking into it.
For example, Ross's soundjuicer looks really nice and this is the kind of 
app we would like to see done in the future, combining core GNOME and 
GStreamer technology.

So, rather than scrambling to rush and decide issues like
gaim vs gossip
galeon vs epiphany
gst-player vs totem

we should see where things are going if we are worried about making the 
right choice for the future.

When I first tried galeon more than a year ago I thought it was God's gift 
to browsing.  I still think it is, but I've tried epiphany as well and it 
seems to be more gnome-y.  Which will win my and ours fancy in the next 
year ? Who knows.  It doesn't seem like something we should decide *right 
now* however.

Thomas

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