The noninclusion of Gaim (was: Re: Module proposal for gnome 2.5)

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

mån 2003-10-06 klockan 21.58 skrev Dominic Howells:
> Also, gaim now has addressed most of the reasond for which gossip was
> started.

Gaim is not an option for inclusion in GNOME. It's not a GNOME
application and, probably more important, its developers have repeatedly
and very clearly stated that they don't have the intention of making it
so either(*).

It's also an issue on more practical levels. The fact that they don't
use (and don't want to use) GNOME CVS is a showstopper for the GNOME
Translation Project, as we thus can't properly translate Gaim.
We could of course mail translations to the Gaim developers and hope for
them to include those, but there's no guarantee that will happen, nor is
there any guarantee that J. Random Translator can mail another
translation of babelfish quality the day after and have his translation
replace anyone from the GNOME Translation Project. Which, as a matter of
fact, is exactly what's happening right now with Gaim translations --
it's an anarchy where anyone can submit any excuse for a translation.
The developers obviously can't check them for quality since they don't
know the language, and can't keep track of who's maintaining what, and
thus they end up committing basically everything that gets sent to them.
Thus, Gaim simply isn't an option if we want to assure any type of
translation quality or consistency.

And this was just one example where including Gaim in the GNOME project
would fail miserably.
We can't force the Gaim developers to join the GNOME project and
cooperate with it. Thus, discussing inclusion of Gaim in GNOME is, how
noble the intentions even may be, utterly pointless.

All of this is of course strictly my own opinion.

Christian


(*) http://www.menthos.com/brev/gaim-devel.txt