Re: GNOME, .Net and Mono

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

Guys - GNOME 4 is at least 2 years away, probably 4. A Mono mature
enough to match the maturity GNOME will have by then is also some
reasonable amount of time away. These timescales are an eternity in
the software industry.

So we're speculating about what GNOME will be like in that time,
speculating about what Mono will be like, then speculating further
about the goals each project will have by then, then speculating
further about how all this stuff interacts. We're also speculating
about how the whole industry will move with respect to Java, .NET, and
other such technologies.

There is just no point in thinking about it for now, unless someone
here is clairvoyant. For any reasonable planning horizon, GNOME is
based on C, with some language bindings.

That's why you have seen no decision by the GNOME project on Mono, and
you shouldn't expect to see one in the near future. Our current focus
is on GNOME 2. After that our focus will be on GNOME 2.0.1 and 2.2.

I don't mean to imply here that Mono is good or bad or indifferent,
just that until the GNOME/Mono question is far more concrete, it's
nothing but fuel for tabloids and flamewars - any discussion is going
to be wildly hypothetical and more or less irrelevant.

When talking to people you know (or to media), please try to ensure
they understand that the GNOME Project has no plans - one way or the
other - with respect to Mono.

[This mail is my personal view only, of course.]

Havoc