Re: build system alternatives (Was: Using vala in GNOME)

["Alberto Ruiz" <aruiz gnome org>]

2008/7/1 Colin Walters <walters redhat com>:
> On Tue, 2008-07-01 at 16:02 -0300, Johan Dahlin wrote:
> Strategically speaking, while I think it makes sense for GNOME to invest
> in the fundamentals (core GTK+ windowing, DBus) of running on
> non-freedesktop.org platforms[1], developer time is better spent pushing
> the free platform as a whole forward.  Competing with
> Qt/Swing/Windows.Forms/XULRunner/AIR (Qt in particular) for this is a
> big project.

Exactly, and to push it forward we need to build bridges for people to
migrate. Thunderbird is the email client of choice in a lot of
universities and corporate environments because you learn how to use
the tool once and then admins can switch the platform from Windows to
Linux to Mac OS X with one less issue to worry about.

There's simply no way to provide a non steep migration path for people
from Windows or Mac OS X to Linux besides
thunderbird+firefox+openoffice.org.

GIMP and Inkscape are successful cross platform projects already, but
to support those platforms they spend a huge amount of resources on
creating build scripts and environments that cannot be easily
replicated. Part of them having to spend so much time is our fault. I
would like to see Evince being the most popular lightweight PDF reader
at Windows, and college students using PyGtk to learn GUI development
on their Windows XP workstations on college labs.

99% of the time this situation of lack of support on non-freedesktop
platform has nothing to do with our code being not portable rather
than the tools we use to build it. This leads to a lack of interest on
choosing it to build cross platform tools, and almost no specific
contributions to support those platforms properly.

So basically, my ultimate goal is to enable freedesktop.org compliant
platforms, and the GNOME platform and desktop a bridge to get users
and developers where the volume really is at the moment, which is the
Windows and up to some extend the Mac environment. This user base is
conformed mostly by people that simply don't know  that they have a
choice (and don't have in some circumstances).

Having a powerful set of cross platform tools is a great way to
attract users and developers to desktop freedom!

...dude, I really need to learn to summarize my points, I'm writting
pretty long and boring emails lately!


> [1] I tend not to say "Linux" for this anymore; freedesktop.org is a lot
> more accurate
>

I actually like that term ;-)

-- 
Cheers,
Alberto Ruiz