Re: Question for Bastian Nocera

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Mon, 2010-06-07 at 13:15 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
> I would think it being fine to say, GNOME is:
>     - Linux kernel
>     - D-Bus
>     - NetworkManager/BlueZ/PolicyKit/udisks/upower
>     - X11
>     all the way to GTK+/Clutter combination and apps
> 
> It seems like stretching things that a GUI desktop
> includes all the lower level facilities it runs on.

Obviously, GNOME does not control the Linux kernel, or D-Bus, or a
number of that shared infrastructure.

> Also, if Linux is part of GNOME, that would imply it is part of GNU.
> I don't think we want to imply that conclusion.

I guess that you misunderstood my original mail. We need to be able to
drain the swamp, and fix problems that occur at any point in the
infrastructure between the bottom level (in most cases, the kernel), and
the top level (us, GNOME).

Do we want to spend time being held back by the missing infrastructure
on other OSes than Linux? The large majority of contributors use Linux,
and we'd like to be able to not get held back.

For example, the preferred solution for audio in GNOME is PulseAudio,
and thanks to it, we have a much better audio integration in GNOME.
Unfortunately it doesn't work on some other OSes where we had working
code before. So we're moving on with it, and other OSes will have to
catch up.

I don't think it's that much of a stretch for us to say "Linux is the
platform we care about, but we'd love to see patches for other
platforms". Because that's what is already happening, just without the
rubber stamp.