Re: Questions To Answer

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> writes:

> 
> The gnome code is irrelevant. The gnome foundation, the LSB, the vendors need
> APIs not code. APIs are protocol specifications, APIs are largely independant.
> Code is just implementation detail on the interface.

Standards may be important in the future, but right now we don't have
any, and have no plans to create any formally. What we have now is a
bunch of hackers who want to figure out how to organize their project
better.

Maybe standardization will be useful later, but that hardly makes the
GNOME Foundation primarily a standards body. In fact, if there are
standards, it would be better if they were promulgated by some
independent entity, e.g. LSB.

I don't understand why people keep bringing up this standards thing
now. More formally organizing the project is not going to make people
magically switch from writing code to writing standards, no matter how
desirable that would be (and personally I don't think it would - the
Windows API has been very successful without any of it ever being
formally standardized). What we need is a structure to organize what
we do NOW, not to handle someone's vision of what we really ought to
be doing.

 - Maciej