Re: GNOME and non-linux platforms (release team please stand up)

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Wed, 2009-07-22 at 16:27 +0100, Calum Benson wrote:
> On 22 Jul 2009, at 15:56, Johannes Schmid wrote:
> 
> > OK, I can install all those in a virtual machine but just the amount  
> > of
> > work I had to put in for basic testing cannot be really done in my  
> > free
> > time.
> 
> That's certainly true for many individual contributors, which is why I  
> also said we ought to "to figure out how to better distribute the  
> development and QA workload to make that happen".
> 
> However, for people who make their living developing GNOME software,  
> IMHO it behooves them as professional open source software engineers  
> to respect the requirements of the other people who will be using the  
> code they write, insofar as those requirements are known up front.   
> And right now, every professional GNOME developer knows up front that  
> GNOME isn't confined to running on Linux, so that should figure fairly  
> strongly into their design work.

You know, maybe if the non-Linux platforms actually participated in
_designing_ and _developing_ the core plumbing bits, threads like this
wouldn't have to happen. 

My experiences from GIO, GVfs and HAL and other things pretty much sums
up to this.

 1. We find out we need some new plumbing bits to enable some kind
    of new exciting feature in GNOME.

 2. Someone starts working on a Linux implementation of this. The
    interface is usually designed to be portable, but, hey, who
    knows.

 3. GNOME is ported to using this new plumbing bit. After a while the
    plumbing bit matures and the new feature is being ironed out.
    Much rejoicing.

 4. Someone from SUN finds out that the latest version of some GNOME
    doesn't compile on Solaris or work as advertised. Interesting bugs
    are filed.

 5. Some manager at SUN decides Solaris needs this feature too

 6. The "porting" effort is out-sourced to some group in SUN
    with people that are not really familiar with either a) the
    plumbing bits in question; b) desktop development or GNOME
    development in general

This may be harsh but it's pretty much how I feel it works.

It would be a lot better if non-Linux platforms, like Solaris is in this
respect, actually started participating much earlier. You still have
time for the DeviceKit-disks and DeviceKit-power stuff for example.

Anyway, if SUN started changing this behavior then maybe it would be a
lot easier to not feel incredibly insulted by statements like "it
behooves them as professional open source software engineers to respect
the requirements". Because right now it's the pot calling the kettle
black.

     David