Thinking (and toying with) the concept of a minimal desktop over the
weekend, I got to thinking about how Firefox has become an indispensable
desktop application, and how it is based on the GTK+ (Glib, etc.)
"sub-stack" library set. The point being that even for non-GNOME desktop
environments, Glib, Pango, ATK, et al. have become foundational. In
other words, these days that set of libraries are, for all intents and
purposes, no less essential than say, the X Window (Xorg) sub-stack.
Looking at things that way, it's also true that every Solaris freeware
stack project either diverges from OpenSolaris or not at the GUI (GTK+)
"sub-stack" level. For example, the independent distros have diverged --
albeit, out of necessity -- at this level. (Those projects have such a
broad scope they have to maintain their own GUI/GTK+ library stacks.)
In contrast, the projects that have not diverged (that I can think of)
are: The Companion project, Pat Mauritz' pmpkg project, the
spec-files-extra repository, and Sun's Firefox/Thunderbird ports (found
in the Mozilla contrib repo). In other words, these projects -- although
independent of each other -- standardize on a common GUI library base;
and therefore (correct me if I'm wrong here) together they comprise a
large pool of highly compatible ports.
Eric
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