Re: [Gnome-print] Re: GnomeFont state of affairs

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Miguel de Icaza <miguel@helixcode.com> writes: 
> Maybe it is a stupid goal if you are not looking at the big picture
> and you just want small pieces to succeed.  Granted, it gives you a
> higher chance of overall success if you are just aiming at little
> pieces.  But GNOME is a more ambitious project than a collection of
> independent utility libraries that are orthogonal to each other.  
> 
> GNOME will be everywhere, and to do this we need to build on existing
> frameworks and reuse as much code as possible.  We do want to stand on
> each other's shoulders, not on each others toes.
> 

Right, so that's why each component should be useful to as many people
as possible, whenever that's pretty easy to achieve.

For example, someone recently forked GtkHTML due to the GNOME
dependency. It would have been easier for him to just patch the main
GtkHTML in some way to separate the GTK widget from the added GNOME
features. It wouldn't have been that hard. So, this was a big mistake
on his part. (But it would be a big mistake on our part not to take a
patch from him that did that, as Larry agreed when I was talking to
him the other day. Maybe he forked GtkHTML because he didn't think
we'd take the patch.)

And of course, from a pure engineering standpoint, the more modular
things are, the fewer interdependencies there are, the easier it is to
manage all this code that we have.

Havoc