Re: 2.4 Module List and Rationale (aka GEP10 and 11)

[Marco Pesenti Gritti <mpeseng tin it>]

On Thu, 2003-03-13 at 20:03, Luis Villa wrote:
> I've put up GEP 10, Standards for Inclusion in the GNOME , as well as
> GEP 11, Module List for 2.4.
> 
> http://developer.gnome.org/gep/gep-10.html
> http://developer.gnome.org/gep/gep-11.html

We are really happy you are considering epiphany from inclusion in Gnome 2.4.
We are doing our best to reach a good integration with the desktop and we are
sure the cooperation with the various GNOME teams would help us in that direction.
I'm enthusiast about the direction the project took with the release
of Gnome 2, and I'd be glad to be of any help.

Some comments about the GEP 10 requirements.

Developer attitude
------------------

We have been working with some of the usability folks in the few months of age of
epiphany. I'm feeling their feedback incredibly useful. I dont see this much like
a requirement, but more like something we gain ;)

GNOME-ness
----------

We are not using any deprecated technology. We are actually trying to help developing
some new libraries components, like EggMenu and EggCombo.
I believe the sooner these technologies are tested in real apps, the better.

Dependencies
------------

Here we are bad ;) Mozilla is going to be a problematic dependency to deal
with it, in particular because of the not freezed api.
The GRE work should allow to install multiple version of the mozilla libraries.
Maybe it's worth to target a mozilla version (1.4 or 1.5 I guess). An alternative
would be to keep compile time compatibility with more version.
Anyway, this need to be discussed I think.

Quality
-------

I'm not aware of reproducable crashers or of not working functionalities.
More test will help improving quality, but I'm pretty confident it's already
quite good.

UI
--

GNOME look and feel is the more important reason that made me start galeon before and
now epiphany. HIG compliance and clean design are part of our manifesto (http://epiphany.mozdev.org/).
We feel the HIG a very useful tool to make our user interface easier to use and more
consistent with the desktop.
There are certainly issues but we are doing our best to solve them. It's fun :)

Accessibility
-------------

I have to admit I'm not very clued about accessibility technologies.
We are trying to do our best to avoid obvious problems (for example hardcoded colors).
I'm sure accessibility team feedback will help to solve our problems.
We have a some work to do to make the toolbar editor accessible, we hope other
apps will be able to reuse it too.
See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105129.
I've been looking over the mozilla accessibility code. I have the impression
it could just work for embedders, but I really need to check it.

Internationalization
--------------------

I'm not aware of problems in this field. The last one was fixed some days ago.
(The intltool bug that was affecting also gconf schemas).
Translators have been doing a great work here, we have already a lot of translations,
even if the project is young.

Use of GNOME resources
----------------------

We are already using cvs and bugzilla. Using ftp would not be a problem at all.

Documentation
-------------

Unfortunately we lack documentation. I hope the docs team can help here.


Marco