> I agree, but this lies ultimately in the definition of "the GNOME
> platform" (you can change "GNOME" with "KDE" or another platform
> applications can target).
> I would expect that the libraries that are declared as part of the
> platform to be present, regardless of how hard is it to build them.
In general I agree with you, but it depends a lot on what we consider
the "platform". I don't think everything that we ship e.g. in order to
build the full gnome desktop to be necessarily something that we want to
maintain long term for apps to use. Some things are just "internals" to
the desktop, and not something we want apps to use.
For instance, is telepathy in the platform? libchamplain? libwnck?
libgweather? I dunno. There are no obvious answers here.
Python for instance is a lot trickier. First of all you need to pick a
particular major version of it. Then the minor version you pick might
not be good enough for the app, causing the platform one to conflict
with the runtime one (painful, but can be handled in the app). Then you
also have to pick which parts of the python standard library (and
dependencies) you want to include. It will be kind of large, and in some
aspects duplicate things with the gnome based platform we want to
support.
However, I'm not really against python, i think the line we draw should
probably be on the side of including python3 (but not python2). Its a
tricky line though. Which other gnome bindings to we want to
"support"...