Re: A New GNOME Order

["Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)" <zeenix gmail com>]

Hi!

On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 9:05 PM, Esben Stien <b0ef esben-stien name> wrote:
> 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.

 Agreed!

> 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.

 Also agree but we must be a bit careful with this since if you take
this rule too serious, people might start creating services for
large/generic APIs (e.g gstreamer) that will mean huge performance
bottlenecks and we all know performance is a much more important
concern when it comes to Mobile. Some specific services on top of such
generic frameworks might be a good idea though, e.g a playback service
on top of gstreamer but not a service the exports the whole gstreamer
API on the dbus.

  What I'll be more interested to see is some guidelines/rules
related to performance since I see some very good GNOME developer
openly disregarding performance on embedded systems as an issue saying
"I am a desktop developer, I don't care".

 For example we can have a guideline saying "Try not to use a
higher-level scripting language to implement libraries (especially big
ones) since that will not only make it very hard to justify it's
inclusion in an embedded environment but also alienate all the people
who would want to use their own favorite programming language.
Instead implement libraries in C/Vala and make sure you provide enough
annotations in the doc comments [1] so that bindings for all
higher-level language could be created automatically using
gobject-introspection."

--
Regards,

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
FSF member#5124

[1] Something you don't need to do if you write it in Vala.