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

[Jan de Groot <jan jgc homeip net>]

On Fri, 2006-07-14 at 19:50 +0200, David Neary wrote:
> 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.

Same here. I don't really notice differences in execution speed between
pygtk, C++, C# or native C programs on a quite aged GNOME desktop (I
feel the pain of Java though, but those programs don't use the
gnome-wrapped libs but some bad AWT shit). As package maintainer of
GNOME on archlinux, I don't care if something is written in gtk-sharp-2,
gtkmm, gnome-python or native gnome libs, as long as the package
compiles and works together with the packaging standards. As end user, I
don't care about it either, as long as the looks are quite consistent
(this is why I hate firefox, it's not GUI-consistent while epiphany and
galeon are).
Take a look at beagle for example. GNOME 2.14 got many good reviews just
because they picked a distro for the review that includes beagle. Beagle
was exciting, new, easy, etc. The features of beagle are an example of
something that is good for the GNOME desktop. Looking at the performance
of Beagle, it should be optional, which it is. 
Speaking about performance, I've had beagle running on the background
today with the latest released mono development versions, I didn't even
notice it was running (I used to notice it was running with previous
versions of both mono and beagle). No slowdowns, no swapping, etc. When
mono reaches 1.2, it will be mature enough to become a blessed binding
for non-core applications in the gnome desktop.