GNOME/Win32
Hello! I would like to comment on the current situation regarding recent efforts by Armin Burgmeier [1] and John Stowers [2]. I am deeply interested in the portability issues of GNOME Desktop. Frankly speaking I am totally jealous towards the KDE guys. They can run their applications wherever they like, being it Freenix, Mac OS X or Windows. There are some desktop apps I consider essential. One of them is, for instance, Tomboy. And at my work, where I have to use Windows, the Tomboy experience (a Mono app, mind you!) is really bad. I only found some ancient installer for 0.3.5 and that's all. As John said on his blog, there were efforts for some better GNOME/Win32 experience and I was envolved in one of them. In my opinion GNOME and its libraries should be as easily deployed on Win32 or Mac OS X as they are on, say, Ubuntu. I'd like to concentrate on success stories and blockers and to sum up the current situation. I am not really aware how it looks for KDE/Qt - all comments about it may not be justified. First of all the widely discussed Build Manager issue. Autotools were meant to be portable. Unfortunately portability mainly meant cross-unix portability. Anybody who tried to compile GTK+ natively on Windows knows what I am talking about. Even the cross-compilation ability is crappy, as both I and John have already mentioned. AFAIK KDE Team uses CMake as a Build Manager. CMake also have the ability to build RPM and Deb-packages or so I heard. Alberto have done some job in migrating stuff to Waf. For me Waf is a possibly good choice, beacuse it's written in the same language as jhbuild thus minimizing dependencies. Next step is a jhbuild itself. Running it natively on Windows with the ability to create .msi or .msm is a lovable idea. Perhaps Ali's work could be merged (after some work) with the trunk. PyQt and Qt are easily deployable among platforms and so projects like Last.Fm Player, MusicBrainz Picard or VLC Media Player like to use it. We, the GTK+ band, don't have such abilities and so projects are running away from our gang (okay, mostly abandoning wxWidgets in favour of Qt, but still - not taking GTK+). There are, though, libraries and products that have their success in Win32 world. Libxml2 or GIMP being the cases. Still I'd love to use Tomboy, Empathy, Epiphany and Rhythmbox native and with plugins in Win32 environment. My question is: do you, the developers, see the need to make GNOME more portable and more popular (think 10x10 - deadline approaching!)? Not only among other developers but also among simple users that want to click a Download button and have Epiphany-WebKit with all its goodness installed. Not needing to pull lots of lots of different zip files, manually extracting them and then doing some weird voodoo to the environment variables whatever there are for. For me it is certainly a point worth achieveing, especially now, for we have more and more interest in free OSes as well as we are dropping the dependencies on pure UNIX thingies (dbus, dconf, pulseaudio). What's your opinion? [1] http://arbur.net/serendipity/archives/32-Glom-on-Windows.html [2] http://www.johnstowers.co.nz/blog/index.php/2007/12/11/jhbuild-adventures-on-windows/ Cheers Piotr Gaczkowski ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME/Win32
Hello Piotr, Win32 world. Libxml2 or GIMP being the cases. Still I'd love to use Tomboy, Empathy, Epiphany and Rhythmbox native and with plugins in Win32 environment. I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying, but I do want to point out that Epiphany is designed to be an integrated GNOME web browser. Trying to use it outside of a GNOME environment would probably cause significant loss of functionality -- at least without lots of win32-specific patching. regards, -- Reinout van Schouwen http://vanschouwen.info/ ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME/Win32
Dnia 11-12-2007, Wt o godzinie 17:05 +0100, Reinout van Schouwen pisze: Hello Piotr, Win32 world. Libxml2 or GIMP being the cases. Still I'd love to use Tomboy, Empathy, Epiphany and Rhythmbox native and with plugins in Win32 environment. I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying, but I do want to point out that Epiphany is designed to be an integrated GNOME web browser. Trying to use it outside of a GNOME environment would probably cause significant loss of functionality -- at least without lots of win32-specific patching. Maybe I wasn't clear enough. I don't want it working outside the GNOME environment, but working in the GNOME environment on Win32/OS X platform. Modular GNOME is the wat to do it. Why reinvent the wheel over and over again? If a platform has some keyring library make gnome-keyring a thin wrapper around it. Same with other things. GNOME (for me) not necessarily mean everything that's from kernel (exclusive) upwards (beginning with hal). For me it is just a suite of applications and I think that's true for many other users. I'd like to see certain GNOME apps on every OS possible, having a nice integration with underlying OS an other GNOME components possibly installed. And think you can write your application once and it would work on all supported platforms, generating nice packages/installers for free. This way we can even grab the attention of commercial software developers. Coding less means lower costs. Cheers, Piotr Gaczkowski ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME/Win32
On Tue, 2007-12-11 at 17:38 +0100, Xavier Bestel wrote: On Tue, 2007-12-11 at 17:30 +0100, Piotr Gaczkowski wrote: Maybe I wasn't clear enough. I don't want it working outside the GNOME environment, but working in the GNOME environment on Win32/OS X platform. Modular GNOME is the wat to do it. Why reinvent the wheel over and over again? If a platform has some keyring library make gnome-keyring a thin wrapper around it. Same with other things. I think that's what's going on: parts of libgnome are ripped out and reimplemented properly in libgtk (e.g. gnomevfs = gio), with a proper unix/win32 backend. You can also run Evolution on Windows now, and thats a huge chunk of the GNOME libraries. -JP -- JP Rosevear [EMAIL PROTECTED] Novell, Inc. ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: GNOME/Win32
Hi, Piotr Gaczkowski wrote: For me it is certainly a point worth achieveing, especially now, for we have more and more interest in free OSes as well as we are dropping the dependencies on pure UNIX thingies (dbus, dconf, pulseaudio). What's your opinion? I'd consider dbus and dconf steps forward for portability; dbus would be very nice on windows with a week or two more work, though granted we've gone years with nobody doing the week or two of work. dconf should also be much more windows-friendly than gconf is. However, both of these projects could use contributors to work on the windows port. The new gio/gvfs stuff should also be more windows-friendly than gnome-vfs is. It would be more forward-thinking to focus windows porting efforts on getting apps over to these new apis (dconf, gvfs), rather than focusing on horrible hacks to make some of the cruftier old gnome stuff build on windows. i.e. rather than porting libgnome, etc., get rid of them. What's really needed here is people doing work (and doing it in a correct/forward-thinking/possible-to-get-into-the-mainline-libraries kind of way, not a quick and easy kind of way) Havoc ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
