Re: GConf vs. bonobo-config

[Sri Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>]

> I think there are many obscurities about bonobo config, how it works and how
> it is used in Gnome 2. I will try to explain that at full length.

Dietmar,

I've seen lots of "technical" discourse about GConf vs bonobo-config.
To me thats all well and good and people can discuss this and make
whatever the right technical direction that is best for the project.

However, there is something much more important to discuss.  There is a
set process that has to be followed when you make changes to a library
like libgnome.  That wasn't followed.  In fact there was no discussion of
patching libgnome to implement bonobo-config.  That is the primary
objection by most people here.  We can discuss the hell out of the
technical merits of what you did and thats great.  But until the
maintainers agree you can't commit.   It's as simple as that.  Whats worse
is that GConf was the agreed upon technology for GNOME 2.0. You made a
commitment to using this.

So far I have yet to hear a single explanation from any of you as to why
you broke the process.  Why did you commit?  I'd like to see a direct
answer to this question.  Because I think thats what we all want to know.
Please answer this.

This is not the first time this has been happening.  We've been having
flamefests over this kind of thing before.  The foundation needs to pick
this up and figure out how to deal with this.  It's a social/management
issue not a technical issue.

How do we avoid these kind of things in the future.  Thats the discussion
I would like to see.  Otherwise we're going to be seeing this again in
another couple of months.

It's very disheartening to see this kind of flammage on public mailing
list between people.  I hope GNOME can figure out a way out of this.  It
won't be for technical reasons that GNOME goes down the toilet.  It'll be
for things like this.

	sri