Re: GNOME Namespace Management - ARC & GNOME

["Murray Cumming" <murrayc murrayc com>]

 > On Tue, 2004-12-14 at 11:06 +0100, Murray Cumming wrote:
>> > Brian Cameron wrote:
>> >> One thing that makes GNOME a little easier to deal with is that
>> >> most Sun customers do not build their own applications using the
>> >> GTK+/GNOME stack.  Further, Sun discourages customers from
>> >> depending on (linking against, for example) the GTK+/GNOME stack
>> >> since the GNOME community doesn't provide strong enough stability
>> >> guarantees.
>> >
>> > That's a shame but understandable.
>>
>> No, it's a vague statement, which is even contradicted later when he
>> says
>> that SUN do in fact recommend GTK+ and libglade. It's important to be
>> precise. Maybe we are talking about libraries that are not part of GNOME
>> or not part of the GNOME Developer Platform.
>
> Sun will always strongly support and encourage the use of Java as *the*
> development platform, period. If that wasn't obvious, I don't know what
> is.

But that has nothing to do with how ABI-stable GTK+ is. GTK+ is either
ABI-stable enough or it's not. If it's not, then let's hear the details.

> However, that being said, we do have the following libraries with a
> higher interface level - GTK+, Pango, Atk, Glib and libglade. We do that
> because we are more confident that the interfaces will more carefully
> managed to maintain API and ABI compatibility moving forward. Everything
> else on the stack is almost treated as 'pot luck' by comparison,
> although there is nothing stopper a 3rd party from developing with these
> libraries.

I can imagine that SUN has a problem with parts of the GNOME ABI which are
not declared stable, and/or the extra stuff such as file formats and
executable names.

But I fear that we are talking about simple binary ABI-stability of the
GNOME Platform libraries. If SUN has found that they are not ABI-stable
then they should be telling us, because we want them to be ABI-stable, and
we think they are.

Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com