Re: What is GNOME?

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico helixcode com>]

Havoc Pennington <hp@redhat.com> writes:

> That works for the initial list, but we need the abstract stuff for
> the future, so I hope people will have comments on that too.

See below.

> ee and esound are unmaintained AFAIK, so not interesting for the
> purpose of creating a list of members.

I hope we can ditch EE in favor of a clearly superior
pr0n^H^H^H^Himage viewing solution such as EOG :-)

We need esound for the sound stuff.  Until we have a replacement, we
have no choice.

> gfloppy is an example of something I'd like to exclude; it took maybe
> an hour to write. Of course, Jonathan will be a member for other
> reasons, but I don't think someone should get membership just for
> writing something like gfloppy.

See below.

> gnomehack is non-free, which opens a whole can of worms. In general, I
> don't think we want non-free projects to count. (Though in the nethack
> case, my personal feeling is that it can slide due to nethack's long
> tradition, there's no way we can make that kind of exception in
> general.)

What is the license?

> What's g-print? That printer desktop icon? Didn't Miguel write that in
> an hour or so?

See below.

> What's the plan when imlib is "axed"? And also, imlib 1 is
> unmaintained.

We need to support Imlib1 for legacy applications.  When we ax it, we
just include it as part of the compatibility libraries.

> With several of these, such as ggv, gedit, evolution, you open the "do
> apps go in the list" can of worms. Or do only "apps that come with
> Windows also" like Wordpad and Outlook clones go in the list?
> 
> Anyway, even this list looks pretty controversial. :-( I think we need
> to actually answer the hard questions about what GNOME contains. If we
> can't do that, then we need to answer it by saying that GNOME contains
> everything imaginable. Then of course the worry is that the foundation
> will be run by kids that write gfloppy and gless and stuff like that,
> instead of by the larger contributors with lots of experience.

See below.  Oh, wait, you have reached the "below" point.

We should concentrate on the user experience.  Just saying "gfloppy is
a toy" or "gprint is a toy" is not taking the user into account.
People do need to format floppies and to be able to print stuff by
dragging files to a printer icon.  Thus they should be included.

The GNOME desktop should include whatever users expect to have in a
fully-functional machine.  This includes GNOME Office and Evolution,
Nautilus, and little tools like gfloppy and g-print.  If there are
several applications that provide the same functionality, we should
bless one as the prettiest or most functional or better supported.
This is what we did with Enlightenment and the Sawfish.  We may get
flamed by the authors of IRC clients, but hey, who cares.

  Federico