Re: Next stop Utopia, full steam ahead?

[Robert Love <rml ximian com>]

On Tue, 2004-06-08 at 05:24 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:

>   * Will any of the Utopia high-level components (such as volume-manager) be
>     proposed for inclusion in 2.8?

I would be happy to propose gnome-volume-manager.  We also have plenty
of HAL-ification love for other GNOME components, such as gnome-vfs,
too.

I think that what we do really depends on the answers to these
questions:

>   * Should GNOME Desktop or Platform modules depend on Utopia system or
>     library components (such as hal, d-bus)?
> 
>   * Should/will any of the Utopia system or library components be propsed
>     for inclusion in GNOME? (Desktop to start, Platform later.)
> 
>   * What do we have to consider in terms of portability, in the 2.8 time
>     frame? (Will Utopia features just not appear? Should they be hard
>     dependencies? Should we have fallbacks? etc.)

For gnome-volume-manager to go in, I assume that we need to require the
components in the Utopia stack - specifically HAL, which then requires
D-BUS.

I'd be happy to propose and maintain my bits, and I know that David
would be happy to propose and maintain HAL.  But we have some issues
raised:

        * Code freeze is when? :-)
        
        * Introducing D-BUS and HAL dependencies onto GNOME.
        
        * HAL is written to be architecture-independent where applicable
        and easily sysdep-separated where not.  Currently, however, it
        only supports Linux.  Porting it to other systems would not be
        very hard, but would require that the system make available
        certain enumerations relating to devices.

        * I don't see D-BUS code freezing anytime soon, but maybe the D-
        BUS developers could shock me.

        * While g-v-m might be ready, none of the gnome-vfs etc. patches
        are in the respective trees yet
        
        * Jeff's hard dependency question.  Some things (f.e. g-v-m)
        absolutely require HAL.  Others (f.e. gnome-vfs) can be compile-
        time options.  Run-time fall back is not particularly pretty.
        
        * How is the line between GNOME and freedesktop.org platform
        managed?  HAL and D-BUS are freedesktop.org components.  Are
        they merely requirements for GNOME or do we make them part of
        the Desktop release proper?

I'd love to start some (meaningful) discussion on these issues.

	Robert Love