Shaun:
Shouldn't GStreamer be included for media support? If not in the Platform, then at least Recommended? Also, what about gvfs, libdaemon, and libunique? Brian On 05/05/09 14:05, Shaun McCance wrote:
Hey folks, I'm taking a hard look at the Platform Overview and how we can improve our message to ISDs through better documentation. Our release sets, unfortunately, don't really reflect what we really recommend to developers. That role has more or less been delegated to the Platform Overview. The problem is that what's in the Platform Overview is based entirely on what I happened to think was worth mentioning at some point. I should not be the arbiter of our platform. I would like to get people's opinions on what technologies we should be pushing. I'm interested both in the here and now and in what people think the Gnome 3 message should be. I've organized my thoughts into three categories: Platform contains technologies that are currently in our Developer Platform release; Recommended contains thing that we seem to agree we should push, but are either in the Desktop release or just in our external dependencies; and Others contains stuff that I think is cool and could be part of our core offering some time in the indeterminate future. The list is what came to mind as I was writing this email. Please feel free to discuss libraries I forgot. Platform ======== GTK+ -- The core of how we make graphical applications. Pango -- Internationalized text rendering system. You love it and you know it. GLib -- The foundation for pretty much everything we do. GIO -- Part of GLib, but worth a separate mention in the Platform Overview. GConf -- Configuration system. There is talk of a new system (see below). But I think it's obvious that we need to be pushing something here. So as long as GConf is what we have, it's what we push. ATK -- Accessibility toolkit. Used by GTK+. Should be used by anything else that does UIs. Recommended =========== Cairo -- Incredible drawing library, used by GTK+. There seems to be general agreement that developers should use Cairo when they need to do custom drawing. GStreamer -- All things multimedia. I don't think there's any argument against GStreamer being the Gnome-blessed way to do multimedia. D-Bus -- Inter-process messaging system. Lots of stuff is built on it. How much do we want to push it directly? Avahi -- Service discovery. This is used in quite a few places. I know some people in the past had talked about having a simple wrapper in GLib. How much do we push it? gnome-keyring -- Storing passwords and other secrets. I think this is an important thing to offer ISDs, but this seems to be languishing as a desktop-only thing. evolution-data-server -- Address book and calendaring. I've seen half a dozen projects come and go that aim to augment or replace e-d-s. We seem to like the idea, but I'm not sure we all love the implementation. libsoup -- HTTP library. Honestly, HTTP is such a core thing these days, we need to offer something. Everybody seems generally happy with libsoup in general. Should it be in the Platform? Should its functionality just live in GLib alongside fancy new networking stuff? libxml2/libxslt -- We put these into the external deps a couple release cycles back. Do we want to continue pushing them as part of our platform? Others ====== GSettings -- GConf replacement to live in GLib. Telepathy -- Instant messaging and beyond. I think there is a lot of really cool potential here. Libchamplain -- Wicked cool mapping library. This is not something I would have thought of as something we need to offer. But now that it's here, it's a really compelling technology with a lot of potential. Clutter -- Are we actively embracing Clutter, or is it just something we're OK with people using? The message is unclear. Tracker -- I don't think we can afford to be without a search system. This isn't just about having file search as a feature. It's about providing something that ISDs can leverage to make their applications better. GNIO -- Networking library for GLib. WebKit -- More and more applications are finding uses for an embedded HTML rendering widget. I think we need to provide one with a solid API. WebKit seems to be the direction people are heading in. Various D-Bus services and APIs -- DeviceKit, PolicyKit, ConsoleKit, I think there's something for power management, etc. Are these things we expect applications developers to use directly? What's our message? All right, that's what's come to mind so far. I'd also like to discuss what we're pushing on the mobile front, but that's another can of worms. I'm really curious to hear what the community thinks. Thanks, Shaun _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
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