Re: About GNOME 2.0 - The end of a dream

[Joe Shaw <joe ximian com>]

[CC list trimmed]

> Because people are totally confused about what we want, and what we have done. And
> maybe because we are working on that stuff, whereas others only talk about it.
> 
> > Why was, for example, Havoc not aware of it?
> 
> Havoc was aware of the existence of the "gconf:" moniker, and I also think he
> knows that we write software in order to use it.

Well, from having read the list, Havoc seemed to take offense to what
amounted to be a reimplementation of GConf. I'm sure you've done some
good work with bonobo-config, and I really like the idea of being able
to access configuration data through the PropertyBag interface... but
that isn't really the issue here.

The issue is larger than this particular example. In the early days, the
GNOME platform essentially just gnome-libs (and the panel API in
gnome-core), and "the platform" didn't have any dependencies outside of
GTK+ and an ORB. This was pretty easy to maintain and everyone was
largely on the same page. (Of course, the requirements for what went in
were also a lot less strict. *cough*gtkdial*cough*)

Now GNOME is a larger project with several core modules with different
maintainers and contributors, and few people seem to be on the same page
or have the same vision for the next iteration of the platform. Miguel's
"Everyone Please Give Each Other Love" mail is nice and good, but it
isn't going to get people to have a collective vision for the next
development platform, and is just going to get people mad at each other.
If we were going to have known we would be spending a week on this, it
would have been nicer if we could have resolved this ahead of time
instead of having this flame-fest-followed-by-reasonable-discussion at
all, right? I know you and Havoc didn't agree back when you brought it
up on the GConf lists, but when it has an impact on the development of
the platform like it did, it has to get resolved. I'm glad that this
thread has at least taken this particular issue in the right direction,
but it doesn't fix the overall problem.

Joe