Congratulations. You got my vote. I don't think there's a lot, in your reply, I disagree with.
On Tue, 2005-11-29 at 14:19 -0600, Federico Mena Quintero wrote: > On Wed, 2005-11-23 at 18:56 +0100, Philip Van Hoof wrote: > > > How important are desktop standards for you. How will you attempt to let > > the GNOME developers cooperate even more with the freedesktop.org > > movement? Or do you dislike that movement? In in general: What should > > GNOME "do" with fd.org? > > Destkop standards are interesting when they let external developers make > assumptions. Can I drop a file in a well-known location, and be assured > that a launcher for my app will appear in the panel/kicker/whatever? > Can I, using $foo_toolkit, cut an image to the clipboard and be assured > that $bar_toolkit will be able to paste it in an application? > > Desktop standards would be *REALLY* interesting if each platform (GNOME, > KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, etc.) provided a conformance test suite. > Any of the GUI test suites based on the accessibility interfaces would > be *great* for this. Write an LDTP/Dogtail script to cut an image in > the GIMP, paste it in OpenOffice, and ensure that it works. > > Desktop standards are not interesting if they are not really implemented > by the major players, or if they are implemented with too many > idiosyncrasies or platform-specific extensions. The MIME spec is a very > sad example of this. > > Thankfully, freedesktop.org is not about de-jure standards. What we > need is more people, in any of the platforms, to identify the issues > that would benefit from standardization, *and to go ahead and write and > implement the standards*. > > GNOME should take the responsibility of figuring out what would benefit > from standardization. It should do this by establishing close contact > with other big projects and finding common factors. And it should help > the implementation wherever possible. See my rant on "superheroes" > here: > > http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/news-2005-06.html#20 > http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/news-2005-07.html#06 > > In particular, the second link has a tidbit from Microsoft's infamous > Halloween Memos, which I'll quote again: > > Integrative work across modules is the biggest cost encountered > by OSS teams. > > This is still true, and it is why standardizing things is so hard - no > one wants to change their code to make use of a standard library. > Someone has to go and do it for them. This is why Fontconfig worked. > > > Second question: > > > > What will you do to further enhance cooperation with the KDE developers? > > Will you invite them to our conferences? Will you pay their travel > > expenses? Will you let them talk on GUADEC? Will you visit their > > conferences and will you do a talk about cooperation at their > > conferences? Or will you simply disregard them and think GNOME is > > superior yadiyada (in which case I wont vote for you, by the way)? > > We enhance cooperation by participating in the standards process. > > And there's cross-pollination among conferences already, isn't there? > > I cannot disregard them because my employer has a policy of supporting > both desktops. > > > And D-BUS is moving forward rapidly. This will introduce a lot new such > > standards. Even D-BUS itself is such a standard of which it hasn't been > > said that it's "the" IPC for a typical modern GNOME application. Or is > > it ORBit-2? D-COP? I guess nobody knows. > > D-bus will succeed or fail, just as ORBit/Bonobo did, depending on > whether people write actually interesting public interfaces that any > interested application can use. > > Neither D-bus not ORBit are interesting by themselves. They become > interesting when I can know that I can search my addressbook with them, > or when I can tell applications that the network went offline. > > D-bus seems to be well accepted across more than the GNOME platform. We > need to publicize the useful interfaces which applications expose > through D-bus, and see if they would benefit from standardization. > > > I can imagine companies that would like to target the GNOME desktop, > > while developing solutions for their customers, would like this type of > > leadership to happen. Yet I can imagine a lot Free Software GNOME > > developers dislike "any" form of "leadership". It's not a simple problem > > to solve. Will the GNOME Foundation fill this gap? Or will the GNOME > > Foundation create a solution? How will you, provided you become board > > member, address this. Or isn't this important enough for the Board to > > discuss? Or isn't it the focus of the Board? > > You mentioned Linus as being the leader for the Linux kernel. Having a > leader works for Linux because it is constrained in function: in > oversimplified terms, and from the viewpoint of applications, Linux only > has to provide a Unixish API that works. Linus can then oversee whether > proposed modifications to the kernel are in line with this goal. > > Would GNOME benefit from a central leader? > > GNOME has become too big a platform for anyone to grasp the whole thing > in his head. It has no bounding technical goal. > > We need to keep GNOME from growing simply by accretion. > > The way to grow a large system is to ensure that the different pieces > are in line with some basic principles. That is, we have to ensure the > conceptual integrity of the whole so that the different parts match > together. See chapter 4 of "The Mythical Man-month". > > So, how do we ensure GNOME's conceptual integrity? > > >From the API viewpoint, by ensuring that APIs have more or less the same > form. From the C viewpoint, that means that objects are > reference-counted and provide accesors, in order to be friendly to > language bindings. From the friendliness-to-developers viewpoint, by > mandating that the APIs have proper documentation and that they were > designed with an application in mind. > > >From the user's viewpoint, by following through on the usability > project. If a program is not usable, it's not fit for GNOME. > > So, about a central leader - perhaps we just need to lay down our goals > clearly, write some basic principles (the GNOME Programming Guidelines > have gotten a bit stale, but they are good starting point), and guide > people so that they produce software that follows those principles and > goals. > > > Fourth question (finally a non programmer question! :p): > > > > Because I can imagine it's going to be an important project for the > > GNOME desktop and infrastructure, how will you involve yourself in the > > One Laptop Per Child concept? > > I'm quite involved in the performance and memory reduction efforts. > That will help from the infrastructure side of things. > > Federico > -- Philip Van Hoof, software developer at x-tend home: me at pvanhoof dot be gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org work: vanhoof at x-tend dot be http://www.pvanhoof.be - http://www.x-tend.be _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
