Re: remove tomboy dependency on gtkspell?

[Bryan Clark <bclark redhat com>]

Shaun McCance wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-08-25 at 09:11 -0400, Joseph E. Sacco, Ph.D. wrote:
>   
> > Alex,
> >
> > It is my understanding that a "blessed" GNOME application is to be built
> > using GNOME-sanctioned tool-chains, frameworks, and applications.
> >
> > Other functionality that requires external dependencies not sanctioned
> > by GNOME is to made optional.
> >     
>
> We also sometimes bless certain modules as external dependencies.
> Much of the freedesktop.org platform, such as D-Bus and HAL, is
> blessed as an external dependency.
>
> Here are some of the things that should be taken into account
> when considering an external dependency:
>
> * Does the module have a relatively stable release?  It does
>   not have to follow our release schedule.  But upon each of
>   our stable releases, we need to be able to select a version
>   of the module to depend on.
> * If the module is not hosted on our CVS servers, how well is
>   it translated?  It kind of sucks when translators work hard
>   to get 100% translation, and then end up seeing messages in
>   English because they come from an external library.  We're
>   having serious problems right now with our ScrollKeeper
>   dependency, for example.
> * Is the module free software, and is its license compatible
>   with our use of it?
> * Are there other modules in our release that provide similar
>   functionality?  Then again, we did bless Gecko, even though
>   we already had two HTML renderers.  There are a bunch of
>   spell checking libraries out there, so if we're going to
>   bless one, we need to think hard about it.
I'm probably biased because I don't care too much if there are other 
modules that do the same thing. :)  But I think it's pretty well known 
that GtkSpell is the best spell checking module out there in terms of 
user interaction.  I'm not making any claims about it's library or the 
guts of it, simply it's UI.  And I don't want to train wreck this thread 
with a debate on the best spelling modules so if that needs to be 
discussed please start a new message and come back to this.  What I'm 
recommending is to keep GtkSpell around and work out the module problems 
afterwards, at the end of the day it'd be better if we did what was 
right for the people using our software than the shorter term best thing 
for the infrastructure.

Cheers,
~ Bryan