Re: About writing new apps from scratch

[Tristan Van Berkom <tristan upstairslabs com>]

On Sun, 2014-02-16 at 22:17 +0100, Sébastien Wilmet wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 05:57:09PM +0000, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> > I hope this answers your question.
>
> Yes, partly.
>
> New apps for GNOME is a good thing, when the existing applications in 
> the field aren't well integrated with GNOME.
>
> But for Music and Photos I think it is different. It seems that it is 
> just for the sake of having a new design. Playing music or organizing 
> photos were already possible with applications that are well integrated 
> with GNOME (but with a more traditional design).

Hi Sebastien,

It's a good thing we have some people around who are willing to ask
the hard questions.

To answer your concern, this is precisely why we have our module
proposal period as a very important part of each release cycle.

This means that, while there are always a hand full of alternatives,
basically only one "video player", "photo manager" or "music player"
or whatever is ever officially endorsed by the GNOME community as
the "official" one.

This helps to inspire a spirit of competition - so side projects,
such as the ones you mention (GNOME Music and Photos) - can always
challenge and propose their modules as official again and again.

Also, through this transparency we attract lots of developers
and contributors - GNOME is a community run project, decision
making is not done by some factions in hidden corners and then
conveniently "announced", but out in the open, every six months
during our beloved module proposal period here on d-d-l.

This transparency also helps to ensure diversity in maintainership
and ultimately leadership - since modules which are endorsed as
officially part of the GNOME release are chosen strictly on merit
and not because some factions in GNOME have control of a given
project and so can easily enforce some design decisions in those
modules.

I think I have adequately expressed here my distaste of how things
have changed since module proposal period was conveniently swept
under the rug, around the time of the release of GNOME 3.

> From here the conversation can go in a few directions - have we
reached the maturity where we can constructively discuss how to
bring back module proposal period and hopefully regain some of
the competitive atmosphere and transparency which was a truly
defining characteristic of GNOME, and I believe a driving factor
in the success of our community in the previous decade ?

Best Regards,
    -Tristan

> So for Music, are the common features with Rhythmbox and Banshee 
> developed as reusable code, in a library or git submodule? I've heard 
> that Music uses Tracker, and due to that the performances are really 
> bad. Rhythmbox and Banshee don't suffer by such performance problems, so 
> it seems that the Music developers reinvent the wheel, and face the same 
> problems already solved years ago by other developers.
>
> And for Photos, are the common features with eog and Shotwell developed 
> as reusable code?
>
> Contributors can do what they like obviously, but GNOME can encourage to 
> work on more useful things.
>
> Sébastien
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