Re: Proposed: Rhythmbox

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sun, 2004-01-04 at 16:43, Eugenia Loli-Queru wrote:
> Yes, but not necesserily. This is why the DE should provide a coherent set
> of apps as part of its installation. For example, the Slackware developer
> doesn't wanna put FAM by default on his distro, even if Gnome really needs
> it for a better consistent and responsive experience. But because FAM is not
> part of Gnome, its dev doesn't bother, because he doesn't see the same value
> in it (I wouldn't be surprised if  he doesn't use a DE altogether).
> Compiling and installing FAM manually wound't work on Slackware either, as
> it requires the gnome-vfs to have compiled support for it (and slackware's
> doesn't have any compiled in as of 9.2-Current).

If Slackware doesn't like FAM, GNOME including it doesn't force them to
include it. I don't think it's GNOME's job to second-guess OS
maintainers. Neither is the core desktop and developer platform release
intended to be a complete OS and app suite. It's intended to be the
basic "desktop shell," and there are other coordinated releases of other
parts of a complete OS.

Speaking for myself, I feel totally free to hack things in or out of
GNOME in the Fedora or RHEL packages, if I care enough about an issue to
make it worth the time. Of course, I don't typically need to do this as
upstream is fine, but I have no objection to it in principle.

> Fedora and RHL don't support mp3s and proprietary movie formats, still
> though, these distros have the biggest marketshare together, because most
> people like to stick with the market leader or the brand name they recognize
> better, even if it is an additional pain for the user to add support for
> these manually.

gnome.org isn't supposed to have mp3 code on the CVS server either,
though this issue hasn't come up lately and someone may have put it
there without realizing the policy.

> My point is, the DE should offer as a bundle everything needed by a
> currently perceived as "modern desktop". 

Desktop environment isn't the same as the whole desktop OS. What we're
discussing in this thread is a block of things we coordinate as a
release unit, not what end users receive. The end user product includes
the kernel, OpenOffice.org, X server, and hundreds of other packages
that don't come with the GNOME desktop and developer platform. The end
user product is normally in binary rather than source form, as well.

So the relevant question is how do we make high quality timely releases
that are useful to the people building distributions and enable those
people to make a great end user experience. GNOME isn't shipping
tarballs straight to end users, we're going through Debian, FreeBSD, Red
Hat, Novell, and so forth.

Havoc