Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap

[Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com>]

On 23/02/10 12:36, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
> 2010/2/23 Dave Neary<dneary gnome org>:
> I'd like to point out something though.
>
> As promising as the situation was, I don't think they seriously
> invested in the toolkit itself AFACT, during all this years RedHat
> (through mclasen and alexl) and individual contributors on their spare
> time have been the only ones doing a serious investment in the
> toolkit. There was never a full time maintainer dedicated to make sure
> that GTK+ was moving forward to support those mobile platforms (and to
> help mclasen on the hard task of reviewing patches and making releases
> for both GLib and GTK+). To be honest, I don't think that's the kind
> of interest we expected.

Actually, Nokia invested quite heavily in GTK+. Imendio/Lanedo had more 
developers than Red Hat working on it full time over the past years (I 
could be wrong here). We had Mitch, Kris, Tim, Sven and some work from 
others at times in the company (this doesn't include personal time 
involvement which we have recently seen a great deal of from people like 
Carlos Garnacho on the MPX branch).

> I often hear complaints about how the RedHat guys turn down patches
> from other contributors (mostly from members of companies competing
> with them), but I yet have to see any of those companies investing
> some of their resources on helping to review all those pending patches
> waiting in bugzilla and making sure they have a way to get their own
> patches upstream.

Actually, I think that the Red Hat maintainers of the toolkit had an 
interest in stability (for ISVs) and that stifled development. As such 
developing anything in GTK+ takes a lot longer than it should and that's 
why it is always hard to get into development there or to fix something. 
This has long been the internal politic of GTK+.

I am perhaps not the best person to comment here, Tim for example, has 
had much more personal and professional involvement in the toolkit and 
is much better to make comment on this. My view here is just from a very 
casual contributor watching over a number of years in a company that has 
GTK+ expertise.

> My bottom line is that I don't think that in reality the MeeGo news
> are going to make any difference to GTK+ (I do wonder, however, what
> are Intel plans on Clutter long term wise)

I don't either. There are a lot of companies using it internally that 
never tell public communities about its use of GTK+. British Telecom is 
one of them. I remember when Owen was setting up the projects page for 
gtk.org and I wanted to submit our use cases back then, but internally 
they didn't want to make it public in case customers were worried about 
the fact that we were using "open source".

There are thousands of applications using GTK+ too, let's not forget 
that, what are they going to move to instead if they don't use GTK+?

I also thought that Andrew Savory's point was incredibly pertinent.

As a company we do receive requests for GTK+ support, so I don't think 
it is fair to say that GTK+ is dead.

--
Regards,
Martyn