Re: Revisiting the Gnome Bindings

["Murray Cumming" <murrayc murrayc com>]

CCing to language-bindings.

> When the Gnome Bindings Project came about at the end of last year, I was
> very excited about it. Really excited in fact, as there are many gtkmm or
> perl apps gtk apps around (and even more pygtk ones).
>
> But 10 months later, I haven't seen a *single* distro that has packaged
> the
> gnome-bindings the way everyone expected.

Debian has as far as I can tell. And fedora is gradually becoming
debian-like. It's a fairly large job, so it takes time for distros to do
it. We have never had a good way to force distros to do what we want. But
good distros have a way to give users and developers what they want.

Remember, the 2.6 bindings were an experiment, on a slightly different
schedule, so 2.8 is the first one to really bring them into the regular
schedule and release announcement. So, I haven't expected big changes yet.
Distros take time to react. But, yes, more needs to be done.

[snip]

> Because of the reasons explained above, I would like to ask to either
> include gtkmm, pygtk, perl, ruby, java (and maybe mono in the future) in
> the
> core release (as long these developers can follow the gnome pace). And
> yes,
> I understand that this is a no-go situation currently, however I have
> little
> choice but suggest it.

What do you mean by "core". For instance, how would you change this
release page, which links to Platform, Desktop, and Bindings:
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.8/

> OR, do something about it just so it gets the attention of the distro
> makers.

Maybe you would like to make contact with the various distros, and/or
encourage the individual bindings projects to do this. I have had a little
success with this for gtkmm.

I think that each binding project should at least have links to distro
packages where they exist, such as:
http://www.gtkmm.org/download.shtml

We should also mention something about the level of support here:
http://www.gnome.org/start/getstable.html
(That page does not seem to be linked from anywhere obvious)

> Because the way it is now, the users get nothing out of it. The
> developers do get something from the gnome-bindings thing, but developers
> exist so they can create applications. If these applications don't run on
> most Linuxes/BSDs, that's ultimately a loss for Gnome/GTK+. And don't
> expect
> users to go hunt for things like the perl-gtk bindings in particular,
> which
> are a real pain in the bum to understand how they work and install them
> properly.

I think that perl developers are familiar with using CPAN. And I think
that might be the best way to install those bindings. I'm not an expert on
that though.


Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com