Re: Mono/GTK#/Tomboy

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

Hello,

> I'm way past my quota of repeating myself, and deep in rant land, but
> this is what happened with Bonobo. Developers knew it wasn't ready, knew
> it wasn't suitable for such deep use, and knew there was a risk to
> making it central to GNOME. It was pushed through anyway, and that was
> allowed in order to avoid a split among the developers. But I hope that
> our community is stronger now.

No, this is not what happened with Bonobo.

Bonobo was a completely different ball game.  It was a technology that
we created initially for creating compound documents in Gnumeric, I was
maintaining both at the time.

Bonobo later got reused for embedding controls, which is something that
we wanted in Evolution and something that Eazel decided they wanted to
use to support menu merging across components.

There was not even a discussion of this kind about Bonobo, Bonobo was
merely a dependency to get certain features working.   The problems
Bonobo tried to solve, turned out to be very complex and the solution
turned out to be very complex.

In fact, the steering committee, which lead to the creation of the
foundation, which lead to the board, and to today's release engineering
was created out the need to have a stable release of a number of
components at the time and to mediate between Eazel and Ximian's product
schedules.  We had some cross-company interlock dependencies. We needed
to come to an agreement about how fast each company could deliver and
complete the components they were in charge.  

Miguel.