Re: Module semi-proposal: gnome-shell

[Christian Neumair <cneumair gnome org>]

[orignally and accidentally just sent to Owen Taylor in private]

Dear Owen,

2009/11/2 Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>:
>  GJS and SpiderMonkey: Currently gnome-shell is build using the
>    GJS bindings to Javascript which work with the Mozilla SpiderMonkey
>    Javascript engine. The comparison to seed/JavascriptCore has been
>    discussed quite a bit in the past, I don't want to go into in
>    detail here; basically the advantages for us are:

I have not been following the GNOME shell discussions, but I wonder
why we JavaScript is needed at all. Now that some of the core modules
exhibit Python, suddently JavaScript is discussed. I have always
considered programming and script languages as interchangeable
(besides syntactic and refactoring sugar), so we need a good argument
for adding new ones that just make the dependency stack larger and
larger. I'd really strongly opt for "C + Mono + one scripting
language" or "C + Mono" or "C + one scripting language" when we talk
about the core desktop. I see no advantage whatsoever in a Babylonian
approach -- unless you convince me with good arguments.

>    In one sense SpiderMonkey is not a problematic dependency;
>    SpiderMonkey is distributed as part of xulrunner, and will be
>    present on virtually any computer where GNOME is available.

Now that both the Epiphany web browser and Yelp [1] moved away  from
Gecko to WebKit, it seems to be very odd that we suddently introduce a
XULrunner dependency again. Is this a political decision due to the
collaboration of the GNOME foundation and the Mozilla foundation that
was once announced?

Ay

best regards,
 Christian Neumair

[1]
http://git.gnome.org/cgit/yelp/commit/?h=yelp-3-0&id=3da814fdf5c3dd8d209574fdeb99cc2cf6cbdfb4