Re: External libs support : Re: JAVA in Gnome (fwd)

[Gleef <gleef logical net>]

On Fri, 29 May 1998, robert havoc pennington wrote:
> 
> Forwarded on author's request.
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Fri, 29 May 1998 13:54:24 +0300
> From: Bertrand Guiheneuf <Bertrand.Guiheneuf@inria.fr>
> To: robert havoc pennington <rhpennin@midway.uchicago.edu>
> Subject: External libs support : Re: JAVA in Gnome 
> 
> rhpennin@midway.uchicago.edu said:
> //  Why would these things (Mesa, Java, font servers) be in Gnome rather
> // than distributed separately?  Would any of them have Gnome-specific
> // features?  
> 
> You are perfectly right. There is no reason why a "non gnomified" app or lib
> would be embedded in the gnome dist.
> But What I mean is the following:
> 
> As a programmer, I would like to include neat fonts, and I'd like to be able 
> to
> visualize 3D graphics. But if I do so, I have (at least for Mesa) to suppose
> the user has the correct libs installed on its system. If he doesn't and the
> app is included in Gnome, then Gnome will be broken.
> So does this mean that a app using 3D visu can not be included in GNOME?

Sure, we'd love to see 3D apps.  There's nothing wrong with saying that,
say, GVRML or some such application requires both GNOME and Mesa.


> On the other side. Suppose the developper knows that Mesa or a 
> semi-professionnal font system is included in gnome, then he will think about
> using them. That will make the difference with a programming environment  
> which would not have this possibilities. SGI is the leader in Image Sythesis
> because their environement includes 3D possibilities. 

If we make every library or application that could potentially useful
to a GNOME developer 'included' in GNOME, the size will be astronomical.
This would get two effects, some people won't touch GNOME because "my
friend the computer guru told me it was huge", and some people will do
partial installation of GNOME ("Mesa, that's too big, and I don't do 3d
stuff", "TrueType, that's nasty, I don't want that on my machine").  GNOME
would be less popular, and therefore less useful; and developers still
won't be able to count on all GNOME users having the right libraries
installed.

On the other hand, if we include what is critical, and possibly offer
GNOME friendly front ends for what is not, developers can program for,
say GNOME/Mesa, without all the GNOME users needing Mesa on their system.
It will be up to the person installing the software (with hints from RPM
or other package systems, or ldd if you like doing everying the hard way)
to also install the libraries the sofware needs.


> But still you are right, those shouldn't be mixed with the gnome package. 
> (Does gtk+ have to, thus??) as they are completely separated stuffs.

GTK+ is a specification for every program in GNOME that has a GUI.  It is
therefore critical, and should be included.  Also, GNOME is using the
development track of GTK+ (1.1, as opposed to 1.0), so it is even more
important to explicitly include it.


> But then, there must be a way to create a Gnome-Support package which includes
> the stuffs a Gnome App can suppose to be available on the system.
> A future Gnome-Install program would then have to look if those package are 
> already present, and if not, install them by default.

Yeah, GNOME requires a lot of non-GNOME libraries and packages (imlib and 
guile come to mind).  If we did a big gnome-support package with all of
these, it would screw up the distributers, who want to manage each of them
seperately, and the users who would have to upgrade gnome-support whenever
any of the components got upgraded.

I think that everyone is envisioning that when GNOME gets a real release,
it's going to be up to the people making the distributions to make sure
that all the packages are there, as the distribution customers are the
most likely to want and need something like GNOME.  People who are not
installing from a distribution will find all sorts of help for what they
need on www.gnome.org, and those are going to be the sort of people who
can handle seeing a list of 'this is what you need' and gathering it all.

-Gleef