Interoperabiltiy (Was: Re: Shipping Vera with 2.4)

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <Uraeus linuxrising org>]

Hi,
This being such a political topic I couldn't help but chime in :)
I think the interoperability issue must be the core of this, the
technical issues is second tier in my opinion. I mean it helps little to
be brilliant in your own little corner if the world around you crawls in
the gutter. 

The GNOME community set ourselves a goal of making the Unix desktop not
suck at GUADEC in Sevilla, and to make that happen we need to fix issues
not only in GNOME, but also XFree, KDE, OpenOffice, Mozilla and many
others. 

When working together GNOME and KDE possess enough power and momentum to
make everyone around fall into line, so working with KDE to create this
interoperability systems is the right path to work along. And as Havoc
states; KDE are not willing to use CORBA. Remember that since KDE's
attempt at making a CORBA based component model collapsed with
KOM/OpenParts they have been spending a lot of time and energy on
telling the world it failed not because their stuff was bad, but because
CORBA inherently sucks. One can imagine that after playing that tune for
what must be close to 3 years now, doing a turnabout and going for a
CORBA based solution is to big a loss of face, especially if the
embarrassment is made complete by having a solution that use the 'GNOME
CORBA implementation'.

Personally I do think it sucks that we here are considering moving to a
non-standard solution from a standards based one, but I also think it is
a sacrifice we should and want to make on the altar of Unix desktop
interoperability.

As for the longer term big picture of a shared component system, well I
think that battle is not lost for Bonobo, but the only way Bonobo as a
shared component model will ever become a reality is by finding good
solutions to the issues current GNOME developers have with it, something
I know Marc and Michael have some plans on (plans that need to realized
sooner rather than later IMHO). I think it is equally clear that unless
we manage to make the vast majority of GNOME developers agree that
Bonobo rocks then trying to sell it to outside projects is next to
impossible.

Christian

On Sat, 2003-03-01 at 00:45, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> I agree completely that you could build a bus system with CORBA and
> ORBit. Here is why I didn't do that:
> 
>  - current ORBit/Bonobo ABI has reentrancy/lifecycle bustage
> 
>  - KDE is categorically unwilling to use ORBit, and very close to
>    categorically unwilling to use CORBA at all
> 
>  - I would expect some other large frameworks (Mozilla, etc.) 
>    to have similar views to KDE
> 
>  - CORBA/Bonobo does not seem workable for a systemwide bus, which is
>    the whole justification I have for allocating time to this
> 
> Havoc
> 
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-- 
Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <Uraeus linuxrising org>