Re: 2.4 Proposed Modules - 2 weeks left

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Wed, Apr 30, 2003 at 06:21:57PM +0100, Bill Haneman wrote: 
> I'd really hate to ship gnome 2.4 with gnopernicus and gok but with an
> inaccessible browser, when a browser that works with gnome accessibility
> is available from elsewhere :-/

Mozilla has been explicitly dead-ended with no future maintenance.

Vendors can continue to ship Mozilla until they can organize a
transition plan, and yes this sucks for Red Hat too, but one job of
upstream is to guide the right long-term technical direction and I
don't see how a declared-dead-end-by-its-maintainers browser can be
that.

So GNOME can't ship Mozilla. The fact that it's available elsewhere
doesn't change, regardless of what we ship.
 
> I know that a desktop without a browser is not good, but we have a
> similar "works with but not part of" situation with OpenOffice ATM and
> have had the same situation with Mozilla since GNOME's infancy.  So I
> guess I'd rather wait till 2.6 to bundle a browser if we can't get the
> ATK stuff working outside of Mozilla in time for 2.4.

If someone needs Mozilla, they can still install it. Including a
browser doesn't interfere with that, it's a purely additive step.
Vendors can still default to Mozilla if they want.

What including a browser *does* do is start maturing that browser, and
clarify the long term plan, so that by the time 2.6 comes around
there's a good Mozilla replacement ready to go. If we just leave it
ambiguous and hem-haw until we have a crisis of Mozilla outdatedness
and non-maintenance that forces us to move, then we won't be ready to
move when we need to.

Plus I feel confident that we have a browser that works very well, and
we can be proud to ship it. If it was inherently not-a11y-friendly or
something I wouldn't ship it, but it isn't, there's a clear path to
a11y support as soon as someone does the work.

There isn't much question in my mind that a native frontend is the
right way to go, so I don't see how we can make the wrong decision
here, either.

One argument I do have some sympathy for is that perhaps Evolution and
Epiphany should not be in the base desktop release but rather in some
sort of higher-layer release, but I do think we should release them as
"part of GNOME" in some way, and I don't think putting them in base
desktop is out of the question.

Havoc