waiting for decision

[Gediminas Paulauskas <menesis delfi lt>]

As a developer not involved in core libs development, I'm ignorant of
decision-making process or what was not discussed or who is the bad boy
which reimplements things.

I just need one solution.

On 17 Jun 2001 18:53:55 -0400, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> My second fear is having the board of directors make judgement calls
> on things we have little or no experience and just dictate policy.  I
> am afraid of trying to pretend that the foundation is a company where
> decisions can be made at the top and employees work on what they are
> being told: that is now how free software works.  
> 
> I am afraid that we will manage to piss off existing contributors.

Some of existing contributors are waiting for such a decision of some
board or commitee. i.e. Jody for Gnumeric. I also do not want to start
porting to real GConf or PonG or bonobo-conf, because it is not clear
what will be more widely used in future.

There is no such way "let application authors/maintainers decide what to
use/what fits their apllication needs best". Everyone tries to avoid
extra porting/learning work and just sticks with their own hacks, macros
and convenience functions around gnome_config and preferences dialogs
(look into gtranslator, gtkhtml, gernel for example).

AFAIK PonG is not used by anything. bonobo-conf can replace both gconf
and pong, but not with all features these two have.

If decision was made, application writers (especially who write generic
configuration editors) must know what to use.

Decision to make gconf: moniker the default for bonobo-conf is not
enough. It must be agreed if gconf will eventually be deprecated, so
that no one uses gconf C API.

in both cases, either gconf needs much fixing, or bonobo-conf needs to
get all missing features gconf has. These two must be merged, not left
as client wrapper with cache to abstract server with plugins and
backends or something. There's no benefit in additional layers or
wrappers, just overhead and confusion (and source to bugs).

so please, move on with your developments to create the only and the
best thing, and not look back to what wrong decisions were made and how
much backwards-compatibility must be kept. Everyone needs to port their
applications anyway, no matter to what.
 
--
Gediminas Paulauskas
Kaunas, Lithuania