Re: Revisiting the Gnome Bindings

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sat, 2004-09-25 at 17:21 +0200, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
> Is there any way I can get some sort of sensible fearless rescuing so we
> can drop the guns ?

I think the basic problem is that we would all benefit if we added a
dependency on one or two bindings, but be pretty hosed if we added a
dependency on all the bindings.

There are a couple of reasons:

 1. imagine running a pygtk applet, a perl applet, a gtkmm applet -
    just that would make the desktop a fair bit bigger in resident size.
    This isn't as big a deal with something like a control panel, which 
    you open and close quickly. I'd say it's a non-issue in that case.

 2. imagine the desktop is written in 10 languages, especially 
    if some of them are kind of obscure; it'd become relatively hard
    to build GNOME and become a GNOME hacker, since you'd have to 
    get all these compilers/interpreters and bindings working, and then
    learn all the languages.

Anyhow, so really to use bindings we need to choose some pretty small
number of them, for mainstream languages, or it'd get crazy.

And in that discussion the mono/java can of worms could be opened...

Personally I'd support adding pygtk *only* - because it's a very clearly
different kind of language than C, appropriate in different cases. So it
would still be useful even if we added a new "system programming"
language like C++/C#/Java someday.

But see how quickly followups to my mail become a language flamewar
about how we should really add perl, or C++, or whatever ;-) I think
that's the core thing that might end up blocking a dependency on
bindings :-/

Havoc