Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap

[Alberto Ruiz <aruiz gnome org>]

2010/2/22 Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>:
> Have we lost the mobile battle? It certainly appears that GTK+ has lost
> the mobile battle, but all of the hard work that GNOME hackers have put
> into the middleware platform and components like Gstreamer, Dbus,
> Telepathy and Pulseaudio are now cornerstone parts of both the free
> desktop and the mobile platform.
>
> I would agree that the GNOME GUI platform is not exciting application
> developers right now, and that's something we need to fix. And it's not
> an easy problem.

I'd like to add a bit of an optimistic overtone here.

GTK+ might not be exciting for mobile developers, but I don't think
none of the companies "supporting it" were seriously pushing the
toolkit into that direction rather than monkey patching it to make it
work well enough. So I'd say that GTK+ has gained very little in that
regard as all this time it's mostly RedHat supporting the
maintainership weight of the stack and the ones pushing it forward as
a company over the years.

However, GTK+ is still the de-facto toolkit for the X.org platform,
people aiming to write apps that integrates well with the Linux
desktop, choose GTK+, sure it has many issues, but it has also many
great things and a rock solid code base.

In a broader sense, I think that maybe we should put back our focus on
promoting the stack as what it really has been and still is for most
people, a platform to create great desktop applications for the Linux
platform.

-- 
Un saludo,
Alberto Ruiz