Re: Question for Bastian Nocera

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Thu, 2010-06-10 at 03:44 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> That is possible.
> 
> 						     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).
> 
> I agree it is desirable -- but it may be difficult, since we don't
> maintain those other programs.
> 
> When program A works with B and C, there may be problems that are
> first reported for A, but whose best fix involves changing B and C.
> So the maintainers of A need to talk with the maintainers of B and C
> to get the fixes made.  These situations are often complex.  When A
> works badly due to an inconvenience with B that the maintainers of B
> don't want to change (or that they will change, but it will take a
> year to release the changed version), the best solution actually
> possible is sometimes make a workaround in A for it.

Making sure that the right versions are shipped together is the work
that distributions do. I regularly do work that involves changes to the
lower parts of the stack, such as patching the Linux kernel and the
BlueZ daemon as part of my work on gnome-bluetooth. It is
time-consuming, but at the end of the day, we fix the problems for
everyone in a clean manner.

>     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.
> 
> The large majority of them use GNU/Linux.  Linux is a kernel and won't
> run by itself.

The large majority run Linux, as in the kernel. This habit of correcting
people is getting frankly old. I remember you being a pain at GUADEC in
Copenhagen with your "GNU/Linux" patches to the conference programs.

When I say Linux, I mean the Linux kernel, and I'd like it if you
stopped correcting my words.

>     I don't think it's that much of a stretch for us to say "[GNU/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.
> 
> I agree.
> 
> It's proper for GNOME development to focus on using GNOME within
> GNU, because that's the primary goal: make GNU better.
> In practice, this means GNU running on Linux, so Linux can be
> assumed too.
> 
> Support for other platforms is something that can be done
> when it seems worth the trouble, but it's not a primary goal.

Cheers