Re: Personal remarks on Epiphany/Galeon [Was: Release Team's Almost-Final Modules List]

[Marco Pesenti Gritti <mpeseng tin it>]

> My summarised suggestion:
> 
>   Let's defer our choice, to allow the two projects to "compete naturally"
>   in the time leading up to 2.6. I believe that we will have an obvious
>   winner by then, with stable releases of the browsers, and clear buy-in
>   from users and vendors. They will decide anyway - let's let them decide on
>   the merit of stable releases, not on the "decree" of the GNOME project. I
>   would like to see this "Linus-style" lazy evaluation applied to competing
>   modules in the future, too, if we are unfortunate to see it happen again.
> 
> Thanks very much to both the Epiphany and Galeon hackers, thanks to you
> guys, we have two very excellent browsers that we have to choose from! :-)

Jeff,

I understand some of your problems with the inclusion of Galeon/Epiphany in the release.
But I disagree with your conclusion.

I'm probably looking at it from a different point of view. Proposing Epiphany
I'm not offering a finished product, but rather my work and that bit of experience that
I gained in these years to the community, to build a browser that can satisfy
the community needs. I'm doing my best to work _with_ the other teams and I think
the inclusion in GNOME 2.4 would be a great help in this direction.

I dont think it's matter to make a call between two finished products,
but just make a call about which of the codebases and of the developer teams is more
likely to be a good base to build the Gnome browser.
If no one of them would be then yeah, I'd agree delay would be the better call.

Pro of making a call now:

- We will improve the cooperation between the developers and the various gnome
teams (usability, accessibility etc...)
- We will avoid the projects to go in a bad direction. (like for epiphany:
we will not continue with our braindead bookmarks system,
if there is a concensus that it's wrong ;)
- We will improve system integration from now. Keep developing GNOME 
desktop without a key piece of it (the browser), is a big mistake IHMO

Cons of making a call now:

- We risk to not have the perfect browser for 2.4.

In my opinion, if we delay now, we will end up with worst problems at 2.6 time:
two projects with a large, similar user base but no one matching perfectly our goals.
That's the direction things are going right now, I dont see how that would change alone.

I promise this is the last time I say this ...
We need a browser, let's start to work on it, _together_.

Marco