Re: Certification for GNOME apps

[danilo gnome org (Danilo Šegan)]

Yesterday at 21:54, Andrew Sobala wrote:

> On Wed, 2005-07-13 at 20:42 +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
>> On Mer, 2005-07-13 at 16:27, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
>> > Level 2 - the app is actually written with GTK+.
>> 
>> Why does this matter ? Surely it is about degrees of integration and HIG
>> compliance.
>
> I agree. I was similarly surprised by (on the wiki) the requirement to
> use .glade files as a possibility for one level; surely this
> certification should be about the user experience, not coding practises.

It indirectly affects many things.  Gtk+ and Glade using applications
have a better chance of having consistent user interface AND
translations.  Maybe it would be Gnome-certified on a lower level, but
if it's not using stock menu items, and I have no power over managing
it's translation, I wouldn't certify it as "fully Gnome" since it
wouldn't fit on the desktop otherwise.

Of course, there are counter examples such as Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0
which use Gtk+, yet don't make use of any stock labels and icons if I
remember correctly.

Therefore, using Gtk+ is surely a one level higher (think theming,
a11y, i18n...) than not using it.  Yeah, we can make that a general
statement such as "does this and that", but in practice, it would mean
"uses Gtk+".  Why pretend?

Lets at least make certification process simple, practical and
efficient.

> This leads to a few modifications to the ideas suggested on the wiki;
> for example, "Uses gnome-vfs" would be "Is able to open and save files
> to/from any http:, ftp:, smb:, nfs: (others?) url." Which amounts to a
> similar thing, but is based on how much a user would care.

sftp:, webdav:, whatever else is supported by gnome-vfs on anyone's
system.  Anyone can install more modules, thus getting access to it
through nautilus, yet the application may fail to access it because
it's using something other than gnome-vfs.  Whatever requirement we
make will end up actually being just rewording of "use gnome-vfs" to
not mention gnome-vfs yet imply it (think file chooser, MIME
data,...).

The requirement might be changed to actually be "Support reading any
URLs Nautilus is able to read", or something like that (now, start
arguing that we don't actually need Nautilus to have Gnome desktop,
and there goes our certification IMHO ;).

> Basing the certification on library usage could lead to a situation
> where the certification only matters to someone thinking of hacking on
> the project!

Agreed, but how to solve above issues then?  I gave one suggestion,
but I'm not so sure it's the right one.  Shouldn't we try to be as
practical as possible at this stage of the game?

Cheers,
Danilo