Re: Minutes of the Board meeting 2005 Oct 26

[Glynn Foster <Glynn Foster Sun COM>]

Hey,

On Mon, 2005-10-31 at 15:48 -0600, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-10-29 at 18:48 +1300, Glynn Foster wrote:
> > >         SUBJECT MATTER DESCRIPTION: Introduction, The GNOME Family,
> > >         Overview, Core Technologies, IPC and Network Support, Desktop
> > >         Technologies, Language Bindings, Appendix
> > 
> > Who's the target audience of this document? 
> > 
> > Seems like there is a lot of potential libraries that *aren't* part of
> > our official platform stack that we're advertising, and even those
> > libraries that are could be considered as very dubious ISV interfaces.
> 
> This is not the guide that tells you "these are the stable interfaces in
> GNOME per Sun's terminology".

Let me just say for the record, this is nothing to do with pushing
'Sun's terminology' on GNOME. If it wasn't obvious, the reasons for
doing this are very real, and very important - because we currently suck
from an ISV point of view. 

With every release we push out a platform, half of which, most of us
wouldn't go near with a barge pole if we were having to write new
applications. How the fuck do we expect ISVs to know this?

Maybe only the corporate part of GNOME cares about this, but if we're
all serious about worldwide adoption of the GNOME desktop, you have to
build up some level of confidence in your platform.

> This is the guide that tells you "if you want to write a GNOME app and
> want to do $foo, then you use libbar to do it".  The guide may very well
> tell you that libbar is not particularly stable ABI-wise, but at least
> you'll know what you can use.

Seems like the two documents go hand in hand. I'd personally be cautious
about starting one before the other though - but whatever, I'm not the
one doing the work.


Glynn