Re: Revisiting the Gnome Bindings

[Mikael Hallendal <micke imendio com>]

Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:

Hi,

> I am asking a very concrete, specific thing - here's a module I'm
> maintainer of and which I feel would benefit from being written in
> something more flexible than C, and I want to use python for it.
>
> What would happen to the modules involved ?

My guess is that they wouldn't be part of Community GNOME (whatever that 
means in real life) but that some distributions would ship with your 
module instead (provided that it's better).

This is the same problem (not sure if it's even a problem) that we can 
see in different parts of the desktop. Distributions don't really care 
about what is part of GNOME or not, they will ship with whatever is best 
for their tasks.

Novell will develop their own platform using Mono which from what it 
looks like will not be addopted by other distributions (and not the 
community GNOME either).

In the long run I would think and hope that if you replaced a part of 
the GNOME desktop and it was written in Python it would eventually 
replace the one already in. But that won't happen after a discussion to 
add Python/PyGTK to the platform.

This could happen in two ways,

1) We decide as a community that Python will be part of the platform and
   that it's now OK to write software for the desktop release using
   Python.

2) People write enough good software using one language so that we see
   it worth adding that language as part of the platform.

If we go with (1) it will definitely make people write more applications 
using Python. If we go with (2) a lot of people will continue struggle 
with C while waiting for a decision. These assumptions are based on my 
own view and will not be true for everyone but if I wanted to make sure 
that my application could be part of GNOME I would write it in C and it 
would take considerable longer time than writing it in Python. (so in 
the end I would waste my hours and the application wouldn't be out as 
fast)...

Best Regards,
  Mikael Hallendal

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Imendio HB, http://www.imendio.com/