Re: Revisiting the Gnome Bindings



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.

This should be the job of the Gnome Foundation, not yours or mine. Gnome Bindings is now an official Gnome Project, and so it's under the juristiction of the Foundation. Why do they get voted for? To simply exist?

From their web page: "The Foundation will act as an official voice for the
GNOME project, providing a means of communication with the press and with commercial and noncommercial organizations interested in GNOME software."

Where is the advocacy about the gnome-bindings and their "communication" about it with the distro makers? I have seen *none* such communication (and I would know about it if there was some, Pat from Slackware would have told me already)! Gnome Bindings is a big thing for Gnome, because ~1/4 of all the Gnome third party apps (think "platform") depend on them, and so it is a matter which needs attention.

Besides, *I* have done my part (yes, except cluttering Pat's mailbox asking him to include the bindings). I have reported via OSNews.com about the releases of gnome-bindings numerous times in the past, and I have urged distro makers to include them (we serve 190,000+ pageviews per day these days and I know that people from all major distros are reading it, as OSNews is the No2 Linux-related site behind Slashdot -- with LinuxToday and NewsForge following us in traffic numbers).

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.

I am talking about the users. Exactly because most distros don't package the bindings, the users will find themselves in need to install them by hand. And gtk-perl is a /nightmare/ to install properly, in particular. Ruby is troublesome too (or just "very different", to be more fair). Gtkmm & pygtk I have found them to be adequate regarding their installation routines.

Clearly, this is a job for the distro makers though. Gnome-bindings were meant for developers and distros, not for users (that's what you told me last year). So, where's that distro support a year later? Debian only supports it in its experimental tree, Fedora has half-packages for it, and many of the rest of the distros don't even know about the existance of the gnome-bindings!

I blame "marketing" and "distro communication" (a job that's part of Foundation's responsibilities), not the developers. I read the results of last year's elections and except Leslie, all the rest of the people there are engineers or developers I believe. And engineers/devs don't have time for such things like "marketing", "communication" and "advocacy". It's not their thing (who can blame them? ;-). But bottomline is, these facts hurt the Foundation's goals. It is a good thing to have people who know the internals of Gnome on the Board, but *some* of them should be people who have the time to do the things that an engineer would never do. They are called Evangelists and they usually have some development clue.

As a Gnome user who cares about the platform, please allow me to voice a concern about the slow activities of the Gnome Foundation: I am not satisfied with the pace in the gnome-bindings situation. Or, maybe, this is the only matter that was understimated/underplayed by the Foundation by mistake, in which case I apologize.

Rgds,
Eugenia

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