Re: Module Proposal: Zeitgeist

[Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek gentoo org>]

On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 4:29 AM, Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-04-23 at 16:52 -0400, Curtis Hovey wrote:
>> I think Launchpad + BZR and GNOME + git can interoperate fine.
[snip]
>
> I think the question is, is this OK for a GNOME module?
>
> The main point of requiring use of GNOME infrastructure for GNOME
> modules, as I see it, is that anybody in the GNOME community can
> immediately jump in, start helping out, and start contributing to the
> module. And also, that people working on your module can seamlessly move
> over to working on other parts of GNOME. It's being part of the GNOME
> community.
>
[snip excellent points]
> However, the external dependency mechanism is really meant to be there
> for something that is already out there, that already has a stable
> version that we can depend upon and that provides the features we need,
> and that has a development community and process that are going to run
> independent of GNOME. It's not meant for something that is being
> cooperatively developed in tandem with GNOME features.
>

I was ambivalent to this discussion, but Owen has swayed me and I
completely agree with him now. I think this discussion has been trying
to follow the letter of the rules, but the intent has been forgotten.

One of the intents of the rules is to prevent fragmentation of
development, the codebase, and the community. Another is to allow
people (and distributors) to only need to follow one source of
information (the GNOME infrastructure) to work with upstream. This is
how GNOME's workflow is organised. If Zeitgeist goes outside this;
then it disrupts everyone's workflow whenever they need to interact
with Zeitgeist.

The external deps rule was added out of necessity; some projects are
more than just GNOME-centric; and belong on freedesktop, or a
completely/mostly DE/OS-agnostic infrastructure such as sourceforge,
github, code.google.com, launchpad, etc. We cannot say "Python must
use GNOME infrastructure before python apps are allowed in the GNOME
stack"; but we *can* say that for Vala because it was developed
specifically for use with the Glib/GNOME stack.

-- 
~Nirbheek Chauhan

Gentoo GNOME+Mozilla Team