Re: Time to heat up the new module discussion (from digest)

[David Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi,

Darren Kenny wrote:
> I'm not totally against C# applications themselves - what I am for is choice. I
> don't think any thing other than C should  be part of Core GNOME - to put
> anything other than C into here can cause loads of problems - what happens if we
> start to do all our main development in C# (or anything else for that matter)
> going forward, then less and less of GNOME will be re-usable without Mono since
> all the innovation will be in C#. This is why I think we need a definition of
> what is core...

This is the core of the discussion, and strikes at the heart of another
more important question. What is GNOME?

Is GNOME a platform on which we allow distributors to develop the
desktop experience, or is GNOME a project where we build that desktop,
and enable repackaging and differentiation of distributors on a complete
free software computing environment?

It appears to me that significant blocks of functionality are being
written in languages other than C for GNOME (this is hardly surprising,
C development is slower than development in most modern high-level
languages), and those applications are being built outside our
community. I'd like GTK#, java-gnome, gtkmm, pygtk and ruby-gtk
developers to consider themselves GNOME developers. I'd prefer GNOME to
be a pick'n'mix of complete usable applications rather than a slimline
core platform which generates no excitement.

No-one is going to feel giddy about the low-level stuff (unless they're
Mathias, maybe) - I'm reminded of Murray Cumming's reason for working on
the gtkmm bindings - "I wanted to write applications in C++, and the
bindings needed work". The motivation is to connect with users. The only
users of the platform and the bindings are application writers.

But if FSpot, Gimmie and Muine are the ways to make GNOME a better free
software computing environment, and we're turning them away, then my
next question would be "what exists which does this job better that's
written in another language?" Because I don't really care what language
the app is written in, what I care about is what it lets me do.

It's a discussion worth having, and I'm not sure all of the GNOME
distributors will agree with the conclusion of that discussion.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
bolsh gimp org
Lyon, France