GNOME Whitepapers

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

Whilst being only slightly related to this list's core activities, I
need to post this somewhere so that at least it is archived and I can
point people to it in the future.

I was hunting around developer.gnome.org, trying to track down a
reference for something. In the course of this, I stumbled across the
Whitepapers page (http://developer.gnome.org/doc/whitepapers/). These
are pieces of documentation designed to introduce some "bigger area" to
people (hence the very slight dose of applicability to this list). Not
all of these whitepapers are exactly current news anymore and some of
them are downright dangerous.

So here's a list of the current papers and their status (in my opinion).
I've also listed the author of record in case we feel like chasing
anybody.

1. Current versions are fine
-----------------------------
XML library for GNOME (Daniel)
XSLT library for GNOME (Daniel)
	- Both are links to the appropriate parts of www.xmlsoft.org and
	  are completely up to date and useful.

GNOME Canvas (Federico)
	- Mostly OK

Drag-and-drop in GTK+ and GNOME (Owen)
	- Still correct and applicable and useful.

Esound (Rasterman)
	- Still valid.


2. Probably should be updated
------------------------------
GNOME Multimedia Framework (Elliot Lee)
	- Could stand being brought up to date if it's still relevant.

GNOME technologies (Dave Mason)
	- slightly out of date, but still mostly applicable.


3. Deprecated or obsoleted and replacements exist or should be written
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
GNOME Configuration Files (Miguel)
	- deprecated in favour of the gconf whitepaper (which was what I
	  was looking for originally and can't find. I'm chasing that up
	  with Havoc).

CORBA applications in GNOME (Elliot)
	- a little dated. Deprecated, more than obsolete (but we would
	  need a bonobo white paper that's more up to date than the one
	  on Miguel's website to replace it).

Components in the GNOME Project (Miguel and Jonathan Blandford)
	- Needs to be updated a bit (e.g. talks about gnorba). Again, a
	  decent bonobo whitepaper could probably replace this and the
	  CORBA Applications one.

Internationalization in GTK+ (Owen Taylor)
	- Obsoleted by the Pango whitepaper (which I haven't tracked
	  down yet, but I suspect is on Owen's Red Hat pages).


4. Obsolete, no obvious replacement
------------------------------------
GNOME 1.0 library roadmap (Michael Fullbright).
	- Obsolete. GNOME 2 is the future. :)


So, I'm not really sure why I'm sending this, since it's not like there
isn't enough work to do in the next few months and almost everybody's a
volunteer. But it seemed silly to collect this information and then just
throw it away.

Cheers,
Malcolm

-- 
The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.