A New GNOME Order

[Esben Stien <b0ef esben-stien name>]

I fear we are not setting correct guidelines for GNOME applications
and now with GNOME mobile, there are just numerous weaknesses in GNOME
that needs to be addressed at the highest level; a set of policies. 

It would be very nice with a policy of separating the core and UI
throughout GNOME. This does not only mean applications using
libraries; this means using daemons as the core of every application.

This is proper engineering and gives a very good and powerful base.

An example is Epiphany; by having a browser client core, you can
connect many different interfaces to the core and browse the same open
URLs'. Manipulating the data from a terminal is also a breeze. There
are numerous use cases to this. Some Epiphany developers are favouring
this idea, as per mailing list request.

With different devices and use cases, we have different
interfaces. This is possible with a separated core communicating with
the client over a protocol. This is relevant for any application and
should be the policy of GNOME.

A system wide download daemon, in the same spirit as f.ex mldonkey
lets every application feed a URL, torrent, etc. to the daemon and you
can get notified when the download completes with the notification
daemon.

A system wide media player daemon, in the same spirit as xmms2/mpd,
but also with video and using gstreamer. Applications like totem, and
really most GNOME applications, should just be clients connecting to
such central services, instead of creating poor engineering efforts
where the core code is intermingled with a user interface.

The list goes on and on when it comes to GNOME applications, making
them extremely limited and non scalable, not able to quickly move to
new targets.

We need to use the UNIX power more and we can should foster different
interfaces to very powerful cores, which would satisfy everybody'. A
user interface should be just that; an interface, but the core should
be able to handle more than simple operations.

I'm all for the cute GNOME applications, but I think we're not using
the power that is available to us. 

We need core daemons and good interfaces to talk to them. We need all
user UI and GUI to talk to these daemons. Only then can we adapt to
new targets quickly.

-- 
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