Re: more gnome 2 proposal

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

I've just finished reading your proposal a few times and carefully
considering the points it makes.  A summary of my feeling is that the
proposal contains a number of technical flaws, but is generally headed
in the right direction.  I'm excited that we are all largely on the
same page.  

I *personally* think that the proposal has a number of flaws (but they
were mostly the things they considered flaws in my proposal, and later
on Jacob's).  Again, my feeling:

	Using HEAD is a mistake (reasons available in my doc)

	Our integrated libraries proposal reduced a lot of the pain in
	deploying our existing technologies more wildely in GNOME.

	I like the split of zvt and libart into separate maintained
	libraries.  Not sure about the canvas.

But we can live with the library split, as proposed, and we can live
with a gnome-libs based on the current work in HEAD.  I would like to
see something better for GNOME, but I do not want to get involved in a
multi-week mailing list fight with a coallition.

Maybe I had not mentioned this before, but we have established a team
of hackers at Ximian called the "Ximian Labs" (yes, a ripoff from the
RHAD labs name -- imitation is the sincerest form of flattering ;-)
who are devoted solely to improving the GNOME platform.  We believe
that it's important to make Bonobo and other core GNOME technologies
as high quality as possible, because our success relies on the success
of GNOME.  The people in this team are Michael Meeks, Jacob Berkman,
Dietmar Maurer, Paolo Molnaro and Lauris Kaplinski.

Our original intention was to have this team devote its time to
working on GNOME 2.0, to be sure that 2.0 comes out soon and kicks ome
major butt.  Much of our expertise here is in Bonobo, so naturally we
were going to focus a lot of our energies on that.

Your proposal does not seem to realize the importance of having a
component technology at the core of the system, nor that a unified set
of libraries would ease a lot of the cross-dependencies and the fact
that many times we are just plain blocked from using functionality in
another module because of the dependencies we have.  I understand that
you and Owen want to build a new component system, and hence
integrating Bonobo would be a step in the wrong direction for you.

My desire to have my team work on gnome-libs-2 was to deliver a nice,
consistent platform in the two main gnome libraries.  I think that we
can still do this if we focus our effort solely in Bonobo and
Gnome-Print and on the "components" kit that was part of the latest
Jacob's proposal.

Some of those component we will develop will be ready for 2.0, some
others will be ready by 3.0.

Best wishes,
Miguel.