Re: Proposing module: PyGTK

[Johan Dahlin <johan gnome org>]

> No Desktop applications _yet_ depend on the Bindings because 
> a) the Bindings release did not exist until recently.
> b) the consensus to use python did not exist until recently.
> 
> Someone has to be first.

Well, the bindings release has existed for a two complete cycles. I'm
not sure how much it has improved the usage of bindings in desktop
applications?

> >  But as
> > both you and Jeff point out it might be better to just put it in the
> > desktop platform.
> 
> The Bindings release exists so that applications can depend on the APIs
> that it offers. I think that we gain nothing if we move a module from
> Bindings to Desktop, but I think that it would undermine the Bindings
> release set. I am very much against it.

I think both Gnome and the Bindings has a lot to gain if we move it to
Desktop:
  1) Its now completely acceptable to depend on the bindings in any
     applications in the desktop, eg for scripts/extensions.
  2) You can write modules/applications which later has the possibility
     to be included in the desktop release
  3) The bindings will be used in more applications, outside or inside  
     of the desktop release thanks to the "official stamp" it get.

> If you insist on having a precendent, then you might consider pygtk to
> be like the freedesktop libraries. We don't need them to be in the
> Desktop release, because they are already part of an existing
> "platform". 

That's an a idea, but it depends on libraries in the developer platform
so then it needs to go into a special middle layer, desktop depends on
it, but itself depends on the platform without being in the platform.
Seems like putting it in the desktop is an easier solution to me.

> >  That's the main idea anyway, to have the applications
> > written in Python while the libraries can still be in C (and have their
> > bindings in separate tarball).
> 
> Yes, and that's why there's a Bindings release set. In fact, by moving
> pygtk from Bindings to Platform, you would no longer be saying that it
> is an API-stable platform, because we have always said that the
> libraries in Desktop are not API-stable. Libraries should move _into_ a
> platform release set, such as Platform or Bindings when they are API-
> stable, not in the other direction.

I agree that it would be a step backwards from an API point of view, but
I see no real point in starting to break things just because it moved
from Bindings to Desktop. We (PyGTK) fully intend to keep the API/ABI
requirements the Bindings has.

-- 
Johan Dahlin <johan gnome org>