Re: Mummy, I made a platform in my pants! [Was: focus!]

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Wed, 2006-07-19 at 10:50 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:

> A fucking amazing platform isn't an accident, and we need a fucking amazing
> platform to bring more developers to GNOME - both internal developers and
> external developers. One of our *crucial* audiences must be  FLOSS hackers
> and ISDs. If we don't satisfy them, we can't build our own momentum for
> building this amazing software stack, and we can't build an ecosystem with
> opportunities for everyone else.

The GNOME platform is pretty much *done* at this point from the
viewpoint of "what more code do we need?".

- We have support for most human languages.

- We have a tremendously powerful and rich GUI toolkit.

- We (finally!) have a printing API that doesn't suck.

- We have excellent accessibility at the toolkit level.

- We have a good way to store configuration data.

- We have a rich multimedia API.

- etc.

In terms of code and APIs, we are *done*.  If you remember the Advisory
Board meeting at GUADEC, what ISDs asked for was not more APIs, but the
"polish" things:

- High-level documentation (not done)

- Overviews of the platform (done!  Thanks, Shaun!)

- Detailed descriptions of the platform's architecture (not done)

- Stability guarantees (in progress)

- "Official" word on which API you should use for what (in progress)

- Performance tuning to make the platform leaner (in progress)

Let me repeat:  the platform is *DONE* in terms of code.  We need the
fit and finish now.  Paint, polish, varnish, carpeting, and a nice
glossy pamphlet to guide you through the beautiful building that is our
architecture.  Gaud�ould be proud of its organic nature.

[If you want to be pedantic and are looking for missing APIs, you can
count them on even less than four toes:  a lockdown API instead of
reading ill-documented GConf keys, and oh, screw it, I can't think of
any others right now.]

GNOME is a *great* platform to build desktop-ish apps *right now*.
That's our platform's space.  People who get scared that "Web 2.0" is
going to replace us need to remember that the web needs a good web
browser to run on, and that web browser needs a toolkit to be written
in, and that toolkit is GNOME.  It's there right now and it works.

All the advancements in software for end users are happening elsewhere:
in the web, and in high-level languages.  That's fine.  That stuff also
needs a desktop-ish foundation to be built upon, and that foundation is
GNOME.

Only people who haven't written large-scale software think that it can
be written efficiently in a low-level language.  That's why most of the
programming world is moving to high-level stuff:  it's why companies
write their internal software in Java, why Microsoft is writing their
new software in C#, why all the cool/new end-user apps in free software
are using Python and C# and Java... and you know what?  Under all that
high-level amazing stuff lies a foundation pretty much like GNOME:  let
that be the historic Win32 (in C and assembler since 1983, baby!), the
historic Apple libraries (all the way from NextStep!), or GTK+ (11 years
old!) and libgnome* themselves (almost 10 years old now!).

  Federico