Candidacy: Dom Lachowicz

["Dom Lachowicz" <cinamod hotmail com>]

Name: Dominic Lachowicz
Email: cinamod hotmail com
Affiliation: None

Bio: Maintainer AbiWord, LibRSVG, LibGSF, wvWare, libwmf2, Gnumeric, other 
office-y things

The Gnome Desktop's UI consistency is perhaps the best I've seen, bar none. 
Its development and release teams are amazing. As a collection of 
applications, it is both disjoint and incomplete. As a development platform, 
it is an unholy alliance of various APIs, toolkits, and underlying 
technologies, most of which are insufficiently documented and insufficiently 
portable.

I believe this is for lack of a clear roadmap and development guidelines.

Gnome needs fewer web browser APIs and keychain managers. It needs a single 
socket library. It needs a single SSL/encryption library. It needs better 
abstractions. Above all, it needs for us to choose best of breed 
applications and technologies and consistently and pervasively use them. If 
we do this, we can present a more unified, integrated, consistent, and 
powerful experience for our users. KDE gets this right. Why can't we?

Not doing so hurts our portability. Not doing so hurts our adoption by 
would-be 3rd party developers. Not doing so ultimately hurts Gnome and its 
users.

What can be done to fix this? Above all else, we need to identify places 
where we fall short and develop migration paths. We need to identify 
best-of-breed technologies and deem them standards. We need to encourage 
maintainers to adopt these standards, prodding the maintainers where 
necessary. We need to develop core technology application guidelines so that 
3rd party vendors and our own developers know what technologies we'd like 
them to use.

This plan of action was an overwhelming success when libgnome widgets were 
migrated up to the GTK+ stack with GTK 2.0. But we stopped short of where we 
need to be. We've had enough Gals, Eels, and GtkHtmls for one lifetime. 
Let's pick up where others left off. Our users deserve better, and with the 
right leadership, we can do better for them.

Best regards,
Dom