Re: very rough pre-gep tentative new modules list

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Luis,

	So; if I get the terminology right - we're adding these apps to the
point where we get to support them as much as nautilus yes ? - or at
least group them together with things like the control-center, panel,
nautilus ?

	If so this concerns me quite a bit, if not the following comments are
invalid :-)

On Fri, 2002-09-13 at 19:56, Luis Villa wrote:
> *file roller: as many of you know, gnome-vfs and nautilus do not
> necessarily handle tarballs and other compressed/zipped objects well.
> File Roller (fileroller.sf.net) is a wonderful application for this
> purpose that we hope will help bridge the gap in this area.

	IMHO - since the long term plan has to be to fix this in gnome-vfs, in
an integrated and seamless fashion - it would seem a retrograde step to
have this in the 'desktop'. We should use inclusion to try and get
people to hack on non-fragmentary solutions IMHO; regardless of their
efficacy.

> *galeon:

	great.

> *rhythmbox:

	Sounds ok; as you say we'd need gstreamer - and I'd like to have some
hackers go over the code first; pwrt. portability, ANSI C, etc. Also,
its never 'just' gstreamer; since the gstreamer core is sufficiently
abstract to be unable to play media by itself - we'd need to work out a
set of suitable stable and robust plugins that we could ship as well;
Quite a large task - clearly the gst guys would need to tell us what
they thought they could support.

> *totem: again, this is an app rapidly reaching maturity that still needs

	Again; if we go the GStreamer route - I'd prefer to have people hacking
on that rather than Xine :-) then again totem works now, and scales
properly :-) so.

	The thing is that just pushing something into 'the desktop' and then
popping it out again 'when GStreamer is ready' is a _massive_ time sink.
If we spend many man years making Xine portable, accessible,
internationalised, bug free etc. only to 'replace it' with GStreamer -
there are going to be a lot of people breathing fire inside companies
for whom a complete and polished product is more important than
something that works for a few people once.

> *gcalctool: a more powerful gtk calculator. It is not very GNOME-ish
> ATM; otherwise it's superior to the current crop in many ways. 

	No idea; sounds ok though.

> *gnopernicus and gok: we believe strongly that we should continue the
> push to become a fully Accessible desktop by including the gnome
> accessibility tools

	My feeling is that gnopernicus has requirements (via gnome-mag) on
unstable gtk+, and that the general code quality, and worse robustness
is such that it shouldn't go into the 'desktop' as yet. 'gok' is
considerably better in those respects.

> we expect at least one and possibly several of these apps won't be
> ready in time for 2.2. But because it is easy to cut them loose so
> that they can focus on 2.4, we don't think

	Well; 2.2 is still a while away - and I think it's right - we need to
state clearly and decisively what we expect of a given project to be
included in the long term.

	I think fitting into a coherent vision of where we're going is in many
ways more important than any given functionality though.

	Good to start the discussion though.

	Regards,

		Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot