Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
Hi, Martyn Russell wrote: On 22/02/10 19:27, Dave Neary wrote: Have we lost the mobile battle? It certainly appears that GTK+ has lost the mobile battle, I don't think that's so true. Just because Nokia decided to buy Trolltech because it could be bought, doesn't mean the rest of the world agrees. Well, not just Maemo/Nokia. MeeGo, for example, uses Qt as the preferred toolkit, although GTK+ and Clutter will remain as supported platform components; moblin2's interface was primarily Clutter based, from what I can tell; OpenMoko moved away from GTK+ toward Qt Enlightenment during their self-destruction; Android is not based on anything GTK+-like. GTK+ is hanging in there in the LiMo stack, though. Are there any in-production to-be-continued GTK+-based software platforms out there besides ALP and Samsung's LiMo phones? Dare I say that the developer engagement from both of those platforms has left something to be desired - and the good citizens of mobile GTK+ (Nokia Intel) appear to be moving away from the toolkit as a core component of the platform. Objectively, the number of companies interested in GTK+ on mobile appears to be decreasing from the very promising situation we found ourselves in 5 to 6 years ago. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
Hi, Richard Stallman wrote: What's important to GNOME is the vision and the philosophy of open access, The philosophy of GNOME is that the user should have freedom. If we talk in terms of open or access then we omit what is most important. Software freedom is a means to furthering our vision of providing technology to all, regardless of means, physical and technical capability or culture. This is why the GNOME project has always been concerned about design, usability, internationalisation and localisation, accessibility, and as you point out, user freedom. Freedom is not useful unless people have the means to benefit from it. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
2010/2/23 Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org: Hi, Martyn Russell wrote: On 22/02/10 19:27, Dave Neary wrote: Have we lost the mobile battle? It certainly appears that GTK+ has lost the mobile battle, I don't think that's so true. Just because Nokia decided to buy Trolltech because it could be bought, doesn't mean the rest of the world agrees. Objectively, the number of companies interested in GTK+ on mobile appears to be decreasing from the very promising situation we found ourselves in 5 to 6 years ago. I'd like to point out something though. As promising as the situation was, I don't think they seriously invested in the toolkit itself AFACT, during all this years RedHat (through mclasen and alexl) and individual contributors on their spare time have been the only ones doing a serious investment in the toolkit. There was never a full time maintainer dedicated to make sure that GTK+ was moving forward to support those mobile platforms (and to help mclasen on the hard task of reviewing patches and making releases for both GLib and GTK+). To be honest, I don't think that's the kind of interest we expected. I often hear complaints about how the RedHat guys turn down patches from other contributors (mostly from members of companies competing with them), but I yet have to see any of those companies investing some of their resources on helping to review all those pending patches waiting in bugzilla and making sure they have a way to get their own patches upstream. My bottom line is that I don't think that in reality the MeeGo news are going to make any difference to GTK+ (I do wonder, however, what are Intel plans on Clutter long term wise) -- Un saludo, Alberto Ruiz ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Foundation IRC Meeting on Saturday, February 27th
Hi, As discussed during the last IRC meeting of the Foundation, we're going to hold another IRC meeting next Saturday: When: Saturday, February 27th, from 16:00 to 17:00 UTC Where: irc.gnome.org, #foundation We understand that this time might not suit everybody, but we tried to select something that would work for most people. Feel free to suggest other times for future meetings. We think the first meeting went great, although it didn't have an agenda (by design). To make this one even better, we'd like to have an agenda for the meeting. And this will also hopefully help attract more people to the meeting :-) So please add the topics you'd like to discuss to http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/MembersAgenda Your topics will automatically appear on the meeting page: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/MeetingAgenda For reference, the minutes of the last meeting are visible at: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/IRC20100130 Thanks, Vincent -- Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
On 23/02/10 12:36, Alberto Ruiz wrote: 2010/2/23 Dave Nearydne...@gnome.org: I'd like to point out something though. As promising as the situation was, I don't think they seriously invested in the toolkit itself AFACT, during all this years RedHat (through mclasen and alexl) and individual contributors on their spare time have been the only ones doing a serious investment in the toolkit. There was never a full time maintainer dedicated to make sure that GTK+ was moving forward to support those mobile platforms (and to help mclasen on the hard task of reviewing patches and making releases for both GLib and GTK+). To be honest, I don't think that's the kind of interest we expected. Actually, Nokia invested quite heavily in GTK+. Imendio/Lanedo had more developers than Red Hat working on it full time over the past years (I could be wrong here). We had Mitch, Kris, Tim, Sven and some work from others at times in the company (this doesn't include personal time involvement which we have recently seen a great deal of from people like Carlos Garnacho on the MPX branch). I often hear complaints about how the RedHat guys turn down patches from other contributors (mostly from members of companies competing with them), but I yet have to see any of those companies investing some of their resources on helping to review all those pending patches waiting in bugzilla and making sure they have a way to get their own patches upstream. Actually, I think that the Red Hat maintainers of the toolkit had an interest in stability (for ISVs) and that stifled development. As such developing anything in GTK+ takes a lot longer than it should and that's why it is always hard to get into development there or to fix something. This has long been the internal politic of GTK+. I am perhaps not the best person to comment here, Tim for example, has had much more personal and professional involvement in the toolkit and is much better to make comment on this. My view here is just from a very casual contributor watching over a number of years in a company that has GTK+ expertise. My bottom line is that I don't think that in reality the MeeGo news are going to make any difference to GTK+ (I do wonder, however, what are Intel plans on Clutter long term wise) I don't either. There are a lot of companies using it internally that never tell public communities about its use of GTK+. British Telecom is one of them. I remember when Owen was setting up the projects page for gtk.org and I wanted to submit our use cases back then, but internally they didn't want to make it public in case customers were worried about the fact that we were using open source. There are thousands of applications using GTK+ too, let's not forget that, what are they going to move to instead if they don't use GTK+? I also thought that Andrew Savory's point was incredibly pertinent. As a company we do receive requests for GTK+ support, so I don't think it is fair to say that GTK+ is dead. -- Regards, Martyn ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
FOSDEM Report
Hi, The GNOME presence at FOSDEM this year was quite good, and I believe things went (surprisingly ;-)) smoothly: + we had a good booth, thanks to the event box, t-shirts, stickers, and most importantly thanks to the amazing volunteers. + the devroom went quite well, with a good attendance and interesting talks: http://live.gnome.org/Brussels2010/Devroom. On Sunday, the room became a cross-desktop devroom. + the beer event on Saturday evening was a good place to catch up with GNOME friends. + it's always a great feeling to see many people wearing on Sunday the GNOME t-shirt they bought on Saturday :-) I quickly looked for pictures: booth: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mariosp/4341072001/ stickers: http://www.flickr.com/photos/itkovian/4337980448/ t-shirts: hrm, I can't find a picture (?). I'm sure someone can fix this! Here's a quick list of things to improve for next year: + have nametags for GNOME people. This helps various people, unsurprisingly. + don't forget about the group photo. We were all too busy... + make sure the computer from the event box has the latest cool things to showcase (it didn't have gnome-shell; but Siegfried saved the world with his laptop) + try to get some more hardware for the event box: this year, a netbook with moblin and a n900 would definitely have helped. We're already asking around to get some donation for this, but feel free to ask too if you think you can make this happen! + do not organize things at the last minute ;-) We used the money we got from selling t-shirts during FOSDEM 2009 to print new t-shirts and stickers. T-shirts were sold €10 (or €5 for Foundation members). Money-wise, this results in (approximately, I don't have the exact figures myself): + Expenses: - t-shirts: around €900 - stickers: around €300 + Income: - around €1650 (from t-shirts) This means that we already have some money for FOSDEM 2011. We'll likely do stickers and t-shirts again, but we can possibly do more: feel free to suggest ideas for next year! As a reminder: the original money for all this came from the Foundation (in 2008, if I'm not mistaken), and since this bootstrap step, we're able to sponsor the GNOME presence at FOSDEM with the money we get from t-shirts. The money is handled by GNOME-FR. Many thanks to the people who helped make sure everything went smoothly, especially Christophe (for the devroom), Lionel (for the organization of the booth), Xavier (for the event box), Frédéric (for the t-shirts), Andreas (for the design of the t-shirt) and Baptiste (for the stickers). We had many people helping with the booth, which was great! Vincent -- Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: FOSDEM Report
Le mardi 23 février 2010, à 15:23 +0100, Vincent Untz a écrit : As a reminder: the original money for all this came from the Foundation (in 2008, if I'm not mistaken), and since this bootstrap step, we're able to sponsor the GNOME presence at FOSDEM with the money we get from t-shirts. The money is handled by GNOME-FR. With my board hat: this is a model that we'd like to see other groups adopt when possible. This makes it possible to use the Foundation money for other or new events after the bootstrap step, and therefore make GNOME more visible in more places. Of course, this is not always possible. But think about it when you organize the GNOME presence at an event :-) Vincent -- Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 11:42 PM, Andrew Savory andrew.sav...@limofoundation.org wrote: Perhaps we should reach out to the mobile and embedded community and ask them to contribute e.g. how to get GTK running on a smartphone? Getting a few of those guys over to GUADEC might stimulate some interesting conversations ... I think that's a great idea and I'm happy to personally extend them an invitation if you can help me with the list of people that you'd like to see participate. Stormy ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
Hi! Actually, I think that the Red Hat maintainers of the toolkit had an interest in stability (for ISVs) and that stifled development. As such developing anything in GTK+ takes a lot longer than it should and that's why it is always hard to get into development there or to fix something. This has long been the internal politic of GTK+. Well, I think as GTK+ is really deep down in the stack it's stability and code quality is much more important than adding new features. When you look at some of the older GTK+ code (e.g. GtkNotebook) you see what happens without responsible maintainership. I know from personal experience that it is difficult to get stuff into GTK+. It involves poking a lot at the maintainer(s), actually it was always mclasen who committed and commented things. Still, it's possible to get new features in (GtkToolPalette, action-widget for GtkNotebook). I think it should be even easier for bug-fixes. What I see as a bigger problem is that the chance to clean things up for 3.0 might pass because not enough people are working on this. Regards, Johannes signature.asc Description: Dies ist ein digital signierter Nachrichtenteil ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
On Tue, 2010-02-23 at 13:20 +0100, Alberto Garcia wrote: On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 09:37:46PM +, Martyn Russell wrote: seems gtk+'s object model overhead (for example, object method invocation) is too high, especially visible on mobile platforms... it should be possible to optimize to reduce this overhead... I agree with Emmanuele. Please provide evidence when making wild accusations. Admittedly the run-time type checking in GObject adds some overhead, and it's not hard to see g_type_check_instance_is_a() among the most called functions. This check isn't strictly necessary for object method invocation (which is what Andy was talking about). Especially if your high-performance class isn't using the macro G_TYPE_INSTANCE_GET_PRIVATE but instead has a pointer to the private in its `GObject *parent' struct. The I'm feeling lucky Google for that is: http://sigquit.wordpress.com/2009/02/13/avoid-g_type_instance_get_private-in-gobjects/ However during my work in Maemo I have *never* seen that being an actual problem. When there is a performance problem directly noticeable by the end user the root cause is elsewhere (which may include, of course, other parts of GTK). Right Now, this probably doesn't have much value anymore, but as a funny side note I even remember back in 2000 or so that a friend of mine compared the performance of a C-based object system (inspired by GLib) with that of C++, and -to my surprise back then- found out that the former was noticeably faster. To my surprise can in some cases virtual machines be faster than native code at certain tasks, including their object system. Well, not to my surprise as for many of them it's explained how this works. It's fun to use as a counter argument when yet again one of those ranting anti virtual machine people comes along. Cheers, Philip -- Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer home: me at pvanhoof dot be gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org http://pvanhoof.be/blog http://codeminded.be ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
El mar, 23-02-2010 a las 17:02 +0100, Philip Van Hoof escribió: On 23/02/10 12:36, Alberto Ruiz wrote: I often hear complaints about how the RedHat guys turn down patches from other contributors (mostly from members of companies competing with them), Well if that's the case, then that's something to be madly angry about. I don't know nor do I claim this to be the case. I have not seen this being the case, not for Gtk+ (I'm not involved in its development). Having a person in the position of maintainer while being pushed by his company to reject patches from competitors, is more or less the kind of situation that I'd even propose to actively ban from GNOME. Hold your horses right there. I don't know where are you reading any claim like that. No one has claimed that someone is under pressure by his company to reject patches from competitors, as you seem to interpret -- please be careful with your words. It's most damaging for our goals, it's viral and it instantly murders any interest in our development platform by the (other) mobile vendors. It's also damaging to start witch hunting out of the blue :) Claudio ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
On Tue, 2010-02-23 at 18:38 +0200, Claudio Saavedra wrote: El mar, 23-02-2010 a las 17:02 +0100, Philip Van Hoof escribió: Hey Claudio, On 23/02/10 12:36, Alberto Ruiz wrote: I often hear complaints about how the RedHat guys turn down patches from other contributors (mostly from members of companies competing with them), Hold your horses right there. I don't know where are you reading any claim like that. No one has claimed that someone is under pressure by his company to reject patches from competitors, as you seem to interpret -- please be careful with your words. That contradicts with what you quote from Alberto: I often hear complaints about how the RedHat guys turn down patches from other contributors (mostly from members of companies competing with them) Those people complaining are apparently claiming (to Alberto) that they perceive this to be the case. I wrote, however: I don't know nor do I claim this to be the case. I have not seen this being the case, not for Gtk+ (I'm not involved in its development). That means that I said that I don't perceive it like that. I don't know how much more careful in wording one can be. It is true, however, that it's hard to get a review for certain core components (I'm thinking about the gobject.c performance improvements, which took almost a full year to get any reaction). This is an area for improvement (it would help if more people would be invited to help with said maintenance, I think). Cheers, Philip -- Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer home: me at pvanhoof dot be gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org http://pvanhoof.be/blog http://codeminded.be ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
On Tue, 2010-02-23 at 16:53 +, Martyn Russell wrote: Hi Martyn, Don't be confused: most of this reply isn't directed at you personally. On 23/02/10 16:09, Dodji Seketeli wrote: Le mar. 23 févr. 2010 à 14:12:47 (+), Martyn Russell a écrit: Actually, I think that the Red Hat maintainers of the toolkit had an interest in stability (for ISVs) and that stifled development. As such developing anything in GTK+ takes a lot longer than it should and that's why it is always hard to get into development there or to fix something. This has long been the internal politic of GTK+. Wasn't it possible to develop the new things in branches to showcase your ideas and tell the world about those new features? Yes and it still is, see the MPX branch, the GSEAL work was also started in a branch and many things are done that way. Just to make things clear, this is a real question, not an attempt to point finger or anything like that. I am asking because, even in layers like X.org where compatibility is key, trying things in branches and showing the world proved to have worked quite well. When talking to some of the core maintainers, they often say they want to refactor things internally in GTK+ to make maintaining it easier and getting new people into the toolkit easier. What are we waiting for? The Gods? Ideology? Let's be serious.. Just today on #gnome-hackers, I saw someone interested in getting into GTK+ development and he said it was really hard. I agree. I agree with this person too. It is extraordinary hard: that's not good. Not at all. Johannes makes a really good point too. At some point you could probably say that GTK+ was _THE_ exciting project to work on and a lot of code got in that should have had more reviews and perhaps that's why it needs cleaning up in places now. Comon! How many years of cleaning up does a team need unless it admits that its entire architecture was one big design flaw? I don't believe that GTK+ needs more cleaning up. Its architecture isn't that flawed at all. Let's not be childish and let's be honest about our technology; its future. Not even a mission to the moon ever needed as much years of cleaning up as GTK+ seems to need if you do follow the logic that the GSEAL work is the only big thing a group can do within a year. I think it's untrue to say that GTK+ needs more years of cleanups before it can start receiving innovation. Let's stop being children. No matter how impolite my statements are. GTK+ has also been too exposed to change some of these issues (hence the GSEAL work). I applaud the GSEAL work. It just hasn't been enough for a year or more of work on GTK+: no matter how you look at it, GTK+'s innovation is stalled. To the point that it gets ridiculous. If that statement takes all of my karma, whatever karma means, then it does. So be it. Cheers, Philip -- Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer home: me at pvanhoof dot be gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org http://pvanhoof.be/blog http://codeminded.be ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
