Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap

[Gustavo Noronha Silva <gns gnome org>]

On Thu, 2010-02-25 at 09:26 -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:
>     but none has actually stepped up to write actual code (as Martyn says,
>     everytime you start writting something, you hit the legacy wall).
> 
> It sounds like this might be a case of conflicting goals that cannot
> all be satisfied.  If so, we might be able to enable progress to start
> by making a decision about how to resolve that conflict.

I feel this is the more important piece in this discussion, and I'm a
bit sad to this this point get so little attention. Now, I'm a Debian
Developer, so I know how cool it is to rehash all kinds of useless
discussions again, and again ;D, but I think we should really be
focusing on this specific point, trying to figure it out.

How do we balance "rock solid", "stable". "proven" with "exciting",
"new", "innovative"? How do we keep the standard (read legacy) desktop
use cases working well, while still being able to address the new needs
the world is throwing at us?

I think much has been done to keep GTK+ up with the times, lately - we
do have a number of heroes that are pushing GTK+ strongly into the next
step, and we now have exciting technologies like clutter-gtk, whose
power has been extended to a point that allow us to do all kinds of
wicked stuff
(http://people.collabora.co.uk/~kov/cluttered-flash.ogv)[0].

Still, we keep hitting some walls that are hard to cross, as is expected
when you want stuff to be "rock solid". How to lower these barriers, or
avoid them is what we need to figure out.

I think the GNOME platform as a whole has always been very good at this
balance. Part of our success in this is the fact that we have several,
separate components, instead of monoliths, and we can evolve each piece
of our platform independently, and bring new pieces in, and throw old
pieces out. And we've been very good at throwing old stuff away, for
what it's worth.

I'm pretty sure we will be able to figure this one out, but it's
important we share, and work towards a vision, indeed.

See you,

[0]: http://people.collabora.co.uk/~kov/git/clutter-flash.git/

-- 
Gustavo Noronha Silva <gns gnome org>
GNOME Project