Re: gtkhtml

[Christian Schaller <uraeus linuxrising org>]

Matthew wrote:

> >Things like this really bugs me, how many machines out there have gdkpixbuf and
> >libart installed, but not gnome-libs? Very, very few is my estimate.
>
> See, this is what bugs me.  Gtk is the widget set, and Gnome is the desktop
> environment.  Widgets should be added to Gtk, not to Gnome.  Gnome should make
> use of the Gtk widgets.  That tail is wagging the dog.

I think this is way separates us, I have always considered GNOME primarly as a
development plattform, not as a desktop. The desktop part is in my head just a
marketing channel for the development environment. If people want to replace the
desktop part with XFce or Enlightenment,
I see that as a separate issue than GNOME the development plattform.

Marking the GUI part as GNOME and moving stuff like Orbit, gnome-print, gdk-pixbuf,
libxml etc. into gtk seems to me as a rather silly way to try to be 'neutral' in
what basically boils down to the GNOME \KDE desktop supremecy competition..

> >Of all potential and current CSC/Pronto users how many of them will use GNOME
> >or have GNOME installed? A very large perctange is my estimate.
>
> Irrelevant.  A widget is a developer tool, not a political pawn.  Developers
> are not going to use that widget just because it links to Gnome libs.  However,
> they might fork it, or NOT use it because it does.  The developer community
> would be better served with a strong Gtk rather than a weak Gtk and a bloated
> Gnome.

But you are making it a political issue, because you say that merging it into gtk
would be the solution, since it wouldn't be GNOME anymore. Which is a purely
political move not a technical one.

> This was Havoc's argument.  Developers that are dependency-minded are "weird".
> If your application does not require the Gnome libs, then why link them?  So
> you can be cool in front of your Gnome-using friends?

Is it really a better solution to 'bloat' libraries instead of using the
functionality that is available in other libs? Is for example 20% code overhead a
price we should be willing to pay in order for all libs to say independent of
eachother?

> >This reminds me a bit of Gimp which also have talked about wanting to use 6-7
> >of the GNOME libraries in their next version, but in order to keep their GNOME
> >dependancy low, GNOME libs will not be one of them.
>
> And this is a bad thing in your mind?

My point was that if you require 90% of GNOME then I have trouble seeing why the
last 10% is so controversial.

> >Who the hell are 'all' these people who have all these gtk and GNOME support
> >libraries installed and who gladly will install 50 others as long as there is
> >no GNOME dependency, yet who think GNOME libs will take up to much of their
> >precious disk space.
>
> It's not about me.  It's about my users.  I don't know what libs they have
> installed, so I don't want to take my chances.  If I stick to stock Gtk then my
> odds of having a happy user are increased.  If I want to make a Gnome app,
> which I have, then I make sure to be clear about the dependencies.  I don't
> call a spade a club...

I don't fully buy that, take CSC Mail for instance, it depends on the PerlGtk
bindings which judging by
default inclusion in distributions is much less common than gnome-libs, yet the
author decided to use it instead of starting out in plain C which would have
increased the chances of his users not needing any extra libs tenfold.
And as for your users Mathew, we use your apps since they are the best Oracle tools
out there, and  that is also why we get any dependencies we have to, in order to
get them to run.  And if you decide you want some functionlity in your apps,
offered in GNOME, you can't claim that forking a couple of Gnome libs to get new
functionlity would probly make things easier for us as users, instead of asking us
to get the original libs.

>
> >Just me wondering and feeling a bit sarcastic
>
> Obviously.
>
> Matthew

That said I really like CSC Mail and if the author feels strongly about having a
gnome-libs dependency I will not hassle him anymore on the issue, actually unless
he reads the GNOME list I will not hassle him at all :)  I was just wenting my
frustration over claims that developing their own libs is less of a hassle for
their users than their contributing to and using libs already in widespread use.

Christian