Re: Awesome new Mozilla roadmap!

[Andrew Sobala <aes gnome org>]

On Sat, 2003-04-05 at 16:24, Ali Akcaagac wrote:
> There are a lot of people using 
> Open Source who are not necessarily friends of either KDE or GNOME and try to 
> use their System how's best for them. If you now start FORCING Phoenix to 
> become a native GNOME application then you will get a lot of complaining 
> users.

Namely users that don't want to use any native KDE/GNOME applications
for political or personal reasons. Given that Phoenix becoming a native
GNOME application (which I can't see happening) would have no negative
side-effects, these are the /.ers who will be complaining about
everything regardless.

Phoenix's mission statement isn't AFAIK a simple just-works browser [1]
so it doesn't quite fit the "Official GNOME browser" hole anyway. GNOME
adopts and embraces existing technologies _if_ the developers are
willing and _if_ it would improve the GNOME desktop (for which it needs
HIG compliance and to agree with GNOME's long term goals). No-one from
GNOME is forcing our policy on anyone else if a project doesn't agree
with it. It's just that a lot of projects do, which is why you're seeing
so many HIG-compliant apps out there.

> 
> And from what I see currently on GNOME is - that many projects are hot for a 
> bunch of days and months and then left unmaintained and not really usable 
> after that.

Which ones? If some are useful as you say they are, maybe we should
revive them.

> If I look at the current state of GNOME (and I don't like to lie 
> to you) then I have bad feelings about if this task (turning Phoenix into 
> GNOME) will not end the same way. And then one day we have a lot of half 
> finished stuff laying around on all sorts of places half maintained, half 
> usable and whatever.

I can't really reply to this because I haven't received the mail you're
quoting.

> I think it's better to concentrate on GNOME

The application/GNOME desktop boundary is fuzzy. A desktop needs to have
an integrated (technically and UI-ly) browser; does that mean it should
be in the desktop or a recommended addition? Not a relevant question in
this thread of course.

> with the 
> couple

Let's have a vote for court jester.

> of remaining GNOME developers and make it become usable for users and 
> customers, this is already a hard task.

That's what we're concentrating on.

> 
> Yes Konqueror is indeed a KDE application but you shouldn't forget that they 
> stomped that project out of nothing than their own powers. And I haven't seen 
> one KDE developer yet who forced other important Open Source projects to 
> become a native KDE app or somrthing similar. They are doing their own things 
> in their own borders without trying to catch the hate of other people. 
> Whenever they need something in their Desktop they simply embedd it seamless 
> in their System

But with UI problems, see earlier posts. You're indirectly suggesting
the "embed web browser in Nautilus" strategy again under a different
guise - we're not officially doing that (although Galeon 2 does embed
nicely from technical standpoints).

> or take the code and change it for their own needs without 
> influencing other things.

Forking is not good and will never be good.

> I agree GNOME needs a native Webbrowser with native 
> Wigetset, HIGified and whatever and I do understand that Mozilla/Phoenix and 
> it's Gecko engine fits the needs but then it would be better to grab either 
> MRE or the engine itself, embedd it seamless into GNOME as some sort of 
> library and leave the mainproject Mozilla/Phoenix as is and let them do their 
> own thing.

s/MRE/GRE/

Yeah, I agree (see above). I personally think Epiphany is the way to go.

> I don't know if you understand what I try to explain you but I can guarantee 
> for sure that you will get a lot of hateful comments from people, the day you 
> start turning Phoenix into a native GNOME app in it's default source 
> repository.
> 
> Sorry for my not really diplomatic reply but I like to tell you what I think 
> about this without sounding like a hypocrite

[1] see "epiphany"

-- 
Andrew Sobala <aes gnome org>

"If we eventually have the ubercool component system - based on Bonobo, or
something else - then great, we can then proxy it over IIOP, D-BUS, SOAP,
and morse code." -- hp