Re: Time to heat up the new module discussion

["Joseph E. Sacco, Ph.D." <joseph_sacco comcast net>]

Rodrigo gently raises the seminal question, "What is so different?". 

The answer is known: It is that enormous elephant standing in the corner
that folks have been politely tip-toeing around, trying to ignore. The
Mono project ultimately advances the interests of Microsoft, a company
that is no friend to the open source movement. I question whether it is
prudent for GNOME to be complicit.

That being said... Mono may develop enough of a critical mass following
where advancing the interests of Microsoft through Mono becomes a
non-issue. Languages and frameworks come and go. We Shall see.

What to do???

I would decompose GNOME into the union of two sets: core and extras.
Core should be developed using a tool-chain and languages that are
readily available and universally accepted on all *nix platforms:

        * GNU tool chain
        * C, C++
        * bash, python, perl

Extras, as the name implies, can be developed using whatever language(s)
or framework(s) that one chooses.  The acceptance of an "extra" by the
user community will depend upon what that extra does and how easy it is
to satisfy the external dependencies in order to run that extra.

Core applications should comply to a [rigorous ???] set of standards.
Extra applications should be given some "slack".  Both types of
applications should adhere to GNOME coding [???], packaging, and testing
standards.

An "extra" may or may not be sanctioned by GNOME.  A "sanctioned extra"
is one that is "blessed" by GNOME and is available from gnome.org [cvs &
ftp]. A sanctioned extra should adhere to a set of standards that GNOME
dictates for a sanctioned extra.

Just some thoughts...


-Joseph

================================================================================= 
On Fri, 2006-07-14 at 14:37 +0200, Rodrigo Moya wrote:

> > 
> you are right, but what is so different with Mono that this wasn't
> raised when Python was included?
-- 
joseph_sacco [at] comcast [dot] net