Re: Time to heat up the new module discussion

[Alvaro Lopez Ortega <alvaro 0x50 org>]

Joe Shaw wrote:

>> It is a very different situation. While the power manager support
>> provides new functionality, GTK# would only provide duplicate
>> functionality for another development framework that overlaps with
>> GNOME.
>
> Perhaps I am misunderstanding, but this argument doesn't make any
> sense to me.
>
> Gtk# isn't an application, so by itself it's not useful and doesn't
> really duplicate anything.  It does provide a native API to Gtk#,
> but traditionally language bindings have been considered a strength
> of GNOME.  Gtk# calls into Gtk+, so it's not like we have two
> competing implementations of the toolkit here. I don't see the
> duplicate functionality here.

  My mistake, I didn't explain it correctly. What I meant was that the
  group of Gtk# plus Mono overlaps with a big chunk of the desktop. My
  understanding is that GNOME is a development framework and Mono is
  another one completely unrelated. Both of them have quite big class
  libraries: XML parsers, string management, asynchronous I/O, etc.

  Of course it is possible to use both of them for writing a single
  cool application, although it doesn't seem to be technically correct
  because of all the duplicate code: there would way too many unneeded
  possible failure points and wasted resources.

>> We should not even care about which one is less hoggy.  This is a
>> base problem: "Do we need two (or more) development frameworks for
>> a single desktop?".
>>
>> My opinion is no, we don't. But anyway, if in the worst case we end
>> up using another one, lets ensure it's that, another one, not two
>> or three of them.
>
> It makes increasingly less sense to write applications in C. If you
> look at where the interesting and innovative development has been in
> terms of applications in GNOME, virtually zero of them are C apps.
> They're all either Python or Mono.  This isn't a coincidence.

  For me the problem is not the language, but the addition framework.

  Does it make sense to you to use have three or four different DOM
  parsers in memory at the same time? (libxml2, python, mono and java
  for example). In fact, if it was only that, it wouldn't be that bad;
  the problem is that there are many other pieces that are also
  overlapping with the GNOME framework, and that can do nothing but
  mess up the desktop.

-- 
Greetings, alo.
http://www.alobbs.com