Re: Goal for GNOME Mobile?

[Nils Faerber <nils faerber kernelconcepts de>]

David "Lefty" Schlesinger schrieb:
> Peter Robinson wrote:
>>> I think GNOME Mobile could use a goal. Something we are all aiming for. (And
>>> perhaps we have one and I'm not aware of it.) We have a mission that is
>>> good, http://gnome.org/mobile.
>>>
>>> Could we make GNOME Mobile a complete solution like Android? A set of
>>> software and a spec that hardware vendors could write to and ISVs could
>>> develop on top of? I realized we'd need to expand into the Linux kernel
>>> space to make that happen. GNOME mobile would be completely free and open
>>> and not tied to proprietary web apps like Gmail.
>> What about collaboration with something like LiMo so that there's less
>> need to expand into kernel space or reinvent the wheel?
> This is certainly something we should be exploring (and I'm bugging the
> LiMo folks to do likewise from the other side). I'd strongly discourage
> the notion that GNOME Mobile should represent a complete solution for
> several reasons: it's duplicative--lots of activity going on in this
> space that GNOME should support rather than compete with; it's
> unrealistic--there's no domain expertise in critical areas like
> telephony, etc.; it's insufficiently focused--we should concentrate on
> getting the existing GNOME technologies, particularly things like GTK,
> working optimally on ARM before we start looking at adding more stuff...

I second this but would to add that focussing only on ARM is maybe a
little self restricting. There are other architectures that are very
interesting too, like MIPS and PowerPC, etc.. So it could be rephrased
to "getting the existing GNOME technologies working optimally on
embedded/mobile architectures, make them as modular and less
inter-dependant as possible (like GTK+ not depending on Cairo if wanted
to)".
The dependencies become more and more troublesome especially for
embedded and mobile developers - you just want the toolkit but get a big
bunch of other stuff with it you probably do not need for your
application. On PC based desktops this does not matter much since there
are enough resources - not so in the embedded and mobile space.

Cheers
  nils faerber

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