Re: 2.4 Proposed Modules - 2 weeks left

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

Havoc/All:

I never suggested that GNOME should ship Mozilla (at least not
recently). I only suggest we hold off on bundling some other browser
until we get the embedding stuff working with ATK, since it *does* work
with Mozilla today.

I also don't have a problem with making the Epiphany/Galeon decision
now; I just repeat that it would suck to bundle an inaccessible browser
in gnome-desktop when an ATK/GNOME-compatible one is available
elsewhere.  It would be better IMO to push bundling Epi or Galeon to 2.6
in that event.

- Bill

On Wed, 2003-04-30 at 18:38, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 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