Re: Why GTK+ vs. GNOME?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Sean Middleditch <sean.middleditch@iname.com> writes: 
> In case you are wondering, the reason I finally had to ask was when I
> read of Inti on a Slashdot article, and was puzzled over the fact that
> it only uses GTK+, and doesn't seem to plan to use GNOME. 

The main reason right now is that Inti uses unstable GTK+. So using
gnome-libs is simply not possible. And I'm making the first stable
Inti release before gnome-libs will be ready. After GNOME 2.0 comes
out, I'll worry about GNOME.

As for the rest of your post, if you're on gnome-hackers you would
have seen my lengthy mail about why programmers have a knee-jerk
objection to additional dependencies of any kind. (If you're not,
think about it; most programmers do have such an objection.) So by
default they are going to not use any library. To make them use the
library, you have to convince them it's worthwhile. Flaming is not the
way to do that and many people have tried to do it that way. Vague
stuff about "integration" is also not going to work, you need to show
concrete examples of how the app would improve.

Notably, most of the reasons to use gnome you mentioned are in
_unstable_ libraries (bonobo, gnome-print). This instantly rules those
libraries out for many programmers. You have to realize that most
programmers are looking at using gnome just for the things in
gnome-libs that shipped with October GNOME or so; unstable libraries
don't go into the equation for them. Distributions are not going to
ship these libraries yet (and they shouldn't).

So the best way to get people to use GNOME libraries is to make those
libraries technically excellent and compelling, and then tell people
the concrete advantages using the library will mean for their app.

Havoc