Re: Don't bloat Gnome-libs, bloat Gtk+/Glib

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Michael Meeks <michael ximian com> writes:

> 
>         While I agree with much of the propsal, and particularly the
> splitting of the libraries I must say I'm mildly amused that members of
> the Gtk+ team have the gall to lecture Gnome people on modularity [1]
> 

Hi Michael,

I'm glad you like the proposal in general. I will be putting it into
cvs shortly and try to incorporate suggestions various people have
made. Do you have any specific ideas for how to make the proposal
better, including particular tasks you think should be on the roadmap
for 2.0, 2.2 or 3.0? Havoc has kindly included many planned Gtk+
features on the roadmap for reference, and I know that he, Tim and
Owen are very open to input about these kinds of things. 

If you think a cross-platform portability abstraction library along
the lines of NSPR should be split out of glib, I think we can put that
on the roadmap for a future GNOME release.

I happen to think that a library that provides things like GList and
GObject is also really useful, but you may be right that perhaps that
should not be mixed in with the portability stuff.

I think the criticism of Gtk+ as bloated and absorbing everything is
misplaced. The primary functional goal of Gtk+ is to be a rich,
complete widget set. The fact is that it's not yet up to par with the
competition (Swing, Aqua, etc), and that means the Gtk+ hackers have
to incorporate a lot of functionality that may have been prototyped
elsewhere. I really do not see this as a bad thing. 

But that means that other libraries that aspired, in whole or in part,
to be widget sets need to somewhat reconsider their purpose. One
example of this is refocusing libgnome/libgnomeui on desktop
integration.

Incidentally, I consider all of the core Gtk+ team GNOME people, and I
assume they consider themselves so as well. Some folks may have
misread your statement as implying otherwise but I am sure that's not
what was intended.

Anyway, I hope we can get over the whole who did or said what to whom
when thing. I think we need to focus on coming up with a good solid
plan for GNOME 2 around which we can build consensus. And I feel like
we are starting to get there. Let's focus on what specific changes to
the plan would help make it better instead of digging up old grudges.


Sincerely,

Maciej