Re: Mono and GNOME. The long reply.

[Martin Sevior <msevior mccubbin ph unimelb edu au>]

Ok there are two points I want to make.

1. It is worthwhile to continue to develop Gnome-Office.

2. It is worthwhile to have top developers actually develop important
applications.

On Sat, 9 Feb 2002, Miguel de Icaza wrote:

> > Finally I think we should forget the great opportunity we (Gnome) have
> > over the next year or two to grab a place on small GUI applications. WinCE
> > (or whatever it is called now) ships with pocket Word and Excell.
> > AbiWord/Gnumeric could fill the same role.
> 
> Certainly.  That is one good target market.

So why discourage people form working on it? 


> 
> > I'm not sure this is true. The OO hackers with around 50 full-time hackers
> > have spent the last 1.5 years just breaking the application up so that not
> > everything appears on the screen at once. 
> 
> This is like saying:
> 
> 	`GNOME has worked for the past 4 years on building a panel'
> 
> It is a big overstatement. 
> 

Of course it is. I'm not saying it wasn't hard work. Of course it was
difficult work. That was my point. 


 > > > I agree that we should have more cross
polination between these
> > > projects.  Someone should also seriously look at having OpenOffice use
> > > Gtk+ or at least use the gtk_draw api to get some theme similarity. 
> > > 
> > 
> > This kind of stuff is way beyond a beginning Gnome hacker. The OO guys
> > have to decide to do this themselves. At least they have to tell us they
> > want to do this. 
> 
> It is beyond the scope of a newcomer to GNOME, but it is not beyond the
> scope of a seasoned hacker that wants to make a deep impact.  
> 
> It took Raster and Owen a couple of months to do the core work to make
> Gtk+ themable.  Something that nobody knew at that time whether it was
> possible, it was totally done as a research/visionary thing at the time.
> 
> Yes, they are good, but we do have many good hackers on board.
> 

Of course we do! But maybe too many are working on infrastructure stuff.
Now that we have gnome-2 how about some reasonable fraction of those
people work on important applications. At least let's not have people
saying "Don't work on Gnumeric, AbiWord or a presentation program. It's a
waste of time".

This is what I'm saying.

Best wishes

Martin Sevior