Re: Proposed: Rhythmbox

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sun, 2004-01-04 at 18:57, Joe Marcus Clarke wrote:
> I have to agree.  Everyone here is talking about "distros."  Well, GNOME
> is not just a DE for "distros."  It runs on Solaris (not a "distro"),
> *BSD (not "distros"), and other UNIX-like OSes (some of which are not
> Linux "distros").  If GNOME wants to be a DE that "Just Works," it needs
> to be a solid bundle, offering all the applications a user expects in
> their desktop, and not rely on the underlying OS to always provide the
> missing bits.

Let's keep the GNOME desktop/developer platform release in perspective.
Including or not including something in that doesn't change the number
of tarballs you have to download to get said something on Solaris, or
ease of compilation.

All including something in the core means is that we can have a
dependency of a core module on that something, and the something is
necessarily (rather than optionally) synced with the core release cycle.

> Like Eugenia has said, if you look at other desktops, they do provide
> music and multimedia applications out of the box (e.g. WMP, iTunes,
> QuickTime).  Why should GNOME be any different?

GNOME desktop release isn't intended to be an entire desktop OS and
application suite, or it would be indistinguishable from FreeBSD or
Gentoo.

Note, I do kind of like the idea of including rhythmbox in the core, but
saying that GNOME has to have _everything_ in it just isn't right and
probably including everything is counterproductive to progress.
Modularity is good, both code-wise and organization-wise.  Coordination
between maintainers should only be introduced where useful, otherwise it
becomes pointless bureaucracy.

The line I feel we should clearly have is between the core desktop and
"most applications" - some applications may need such tight desktop
integration we have to include them, or just be basic utilities. But
generally speaking the line around GNOME desktop release should exclude
apps.

Note carefully: the GNOME Project still includes apps, as we have other
release sets such as GNOME Office, GNOME bindings, etc. The point here
is about the core desktop release set, not GNOME the entire project.

The argument for Rhythmbox IMO is that it has an important user
datastore - music files - and I think we should be pushing for a vision
of one UI for accessing and searching all your data, including music,
movies, photos, documents, etc. Similar to the advantages of WinFS.

But the counterargument is that so many apps access data that we should
only have developer platform elements for this, and the apps should be
able to integrate while remaining standalone. Another counterargument is
that we don't have this unified data access model yet, and we should
wait until there's at least some attempt at it.

We need to keep the core GNOME release small enough to be manageable, or
we won't be able to keep the release engine rolling.

Havoc