Re: Questions



This mail is not about CVSGnome, but to clear up some misunderstandings
of what "GNOME" technically is.

Blah blah my own opinions I could be wrong blah.

On Sun, 2003-12-28 at 18:21, Andreas J. Guelzow wrote:
> On Sun, 2003-12-28 at 02:44, Danilo Segan wrote:
> > Hi Andreas,
> > 
> > "Andreas J. Guelzow" <aguelzow taliesin ca> writes:
> > >
> > > The official gnome releases omit various pieces of gnome software all
> > > the time so why shouldn't CVSGnome? 
> > >
> > 
> > It's as simple as this: you're claiming to provide a full Gnome,
> 
> I do not claim any such thing, in fact I have nothing to do with
> CVSGnome nor do I know what a "full Gnome" is.

Well, the foundation is allowed to define what software "GNOME" consists
of. They currently delegate this responsibility, and the day-to-day
running of the releases, to the release-team. So "Full GNOME" means the
stuff in http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/desktop/ and in the release
notes, because that's what we define it to be.

And when a company says they "Use GNOME," that's what they're talking
about because that's what GNOME, the software, _is_. 5th toe is not
"part of GNOME." It's a (very useful) collection of high-quality
software that uses the GNOME platform.

> >  yet
> > you neglect one part which I consider important (and which I
> > contributed to).  
> 
> So do the official releases. (The only reason we are deploying gnome are
> gnome applications that are not part of the official gnome desktop
> releases.)

No, no, no. Software that links to GNOME libraries and uses the platform
is not "part of GNOME," it's software using the GNOME platform. Where
there is an application that is widely believed to be an essential part
of the desktop experience, the maintainer can add it to GNOME, but this
needs community approval which is codified by the release team adding it
to the release.

Of course, I'm not saying the official releases include all the software
people find useful. But it includes all the software under the GNOME
umbrella, and that we give a certain level of guarantee of ABI/API
stability to, and so on.

But if you're making a distribution that misses out some of the software
that the release team (and therefore, indirectly, the foundation) has
said _is_ GNOME, you're not distributing GNOME. As I understand it, this
is what CVSGnome used to do. And when that was the case, it was a very
good argument for not including it in the release notes that tell you
how to get GNOME.

Thanks,

-- 
Andrew Sobala <aes gnome org>

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