Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap

[Philip Van Hoof <pvanhoof gnome org>]

On Wed, 2010-02-24 at 12:41 +0000, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
> Hi all,
> I think that this sort of discussion belongs to the gtk-devel mailing list,
> besides, all of this "nice to have" have been discussed in the past
> but none has actually stepped up to write actual code (as Martyn says,
> everytime you start writting something, you hit the legacy wall).

Ignore the legacy wall and allow major API and ABI breaks. It's time.

> The point that I'm trying to make is that, unless somebody steps up to
> implement some of those advancements and seriously push them for
> inclusion, this discussion is not really going anywhere.

Sorry but, you are absolutely wrong about nobody stepping up to
implement those advancements:

 o. Dova-core and Vala's dova patches are written and exists.

 o. The collection objects are written and exists. Both as a GLib branch
    and in the form of libgee (but in GLib nobody uses it because libgee
    can't be a dependency on GLib, as it would be circular. And the
    mindset also isn't that collections should be used over C-only list
    types - which is why you see with GVariant the introduction of yet
    another iterable thing in GLib -)

 o. A webkit GTK+ component is written and exists

 o. The .vapi files for GTK+ already exist, they just need to be added
    to the tree of GTK+, and an approval should be given by GTK+'s
    maintainers to allow .vala to be used as language for future GTK+
    development.

Every single thing I mentioned in my previous E-mail exists.

The code isn't the problem. The availability of experts isn't the
problem.

The problem is that GTK+'s development style is "it must be stable, you
can't ever break the API nor ABI". This scares the young experts away.

And since this discussion matters for nothing less than the very
relevance of GTK+ and GNOME in future, I think it should be held at the
level of GNOME. It also concerns far more than just GTK+ itself.

But people might have different opinions on that.



Cheers,


Philip


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Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
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