Re: Proposing module: PyGTK

[Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas apestaart org>]

Hi,

> > The main point of proposing PyGTK to be included in the developer platform
> > (or perhaps the desktop if people find it more acceptable) is simply to
> > allow people to chose another language to develop applications than C and
> > make it "officially" supported by the community.
> 
> So, I personally don't think it makes sense to add PyGTK to the Desktop or
> Platform suites until there's something that requires it. I guess the
> rationale is that, if it's there, people will feel as if they have the go
> ahead to write stuff in Python. Right?

I think this is exactly what some people are asking for, hence why it
makes sense to do so before something requires it.

I think the following are the key points involved:

- pretty much everyone agrees that we want to "bless" at least one thing
beyond C to be officially acceptable as a language to code gnome
platform stuff in
- pretty much everyone agrees that we want to "bless" no more than one
of these, since really, we want to keep the desktop maintainable, so
anything that is not optional should be written in either C or this
blessed language.
- From the possible set of languages, there is disagreement which of
these it should be.  But there seems to be a strong indication that
python is the least politically or otherwise charged.  Mono scares
people, Java is hard to do using free tools, C++ is not different enough
from C, ... Python is completely free, well-maintained, and different
enough from C to make it worth it.
- Python is slightly more here-to-stay and slightly more well-known than
guile, so it would avoid the sawfish debacle

Yes, I feel GNOME should put an end to stop-energy in the language
debate by:
- blessing one language
- doing so by putting it one step up from the bindings release (which,
really, by its nature, offers a bunch of language bindings which are of
excellent quality, but do not qualify for providing "the one blessed
language")
- allowing people to GET CODING

Later on, if someone wants to propose a new language binding to bless,
we can have a long stop-energy debate about *that* issue and how it's
unfair to have blessed one in the past.  Meanwhile while that debate
rages on for months, us coders can happily keep on coding in blessed
language heaven.

Thomas


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