Re: GNOME ABI review

[Mark McLoughlin <mark skynet ie>]

Hi Havoc,
	I completely agree with the general sentiment of your mail. We do not
have a coherent "GNOME as a platform" story for developers and in order
to clear that up some really difficult subjects need to be discussed and
(hopefully) some consensus gained.

On Thu, 2003-08-07 at 05:34, Havoc Pennington wrote:

(deliberately ignoring the more straightforward issues and cutting to 
 the chase)

> === 
> Finally, given my guidelines, what are some of the problematic
> ABIs?
> 

> 3. Applets/System Tray Icons
> 
>  The current applet/tray-icon split just doesn't make any sense.
>  Mark's attempt to clarify the difference and how to use a tray icon
>  floundered on massive disagreement. This ABI clearly needs to change
>  at some point if only to clarify the UI that results when you do 
>  various things with your tray icon.
> 
>  In my opinion, applet ABI should be stripped of all dependencies and
>  become a protocol specification built around XEMBED and some IPC
>  mechanism (possibly just X events, but whatever is general). Then we
>  can change our desktop architecture significantly, while keeping
>  applets working, and let applets be implemented by lots of different
>  toolkits.

	What you are essentially saying is "applet's shouldn't be Bonobo
components"[1], right ?

	That's putting the dog well before the horse, IMHO. I'm not sure
whether you consider the issue commonly agreed upon or just don't have
the stomach to have this particular flamewar again. If its the later,
then that's totally understandable :-)

	Anyway, to my point. If Bonobo is truly a part of our supported
developer platform (even if its while we sit around and twiddle our
thumbs waiting for something better to come along) then there is nothing
wrong with our desktop making use of the technology. Far from being
wrong, duplicating functionality that already exists in Bonobo makes
absolutely no sense and gives the wrong message to users of our
platform.

	On the other hand, if there is a general unspoken consensus that Bonobo
isn't something we want to pursue into the future and that it isn't
something we want external developers to be using, we need to make that
explicit. The way forward is not to avoid the issue and go around
stripping the Bonobo dependency from our APIs.


	Anyway ... if your mail was a mega-troll, then this mail is probably
off the scale. But IMHO, confusion about this particular part of our
platform eclipses all other platform confusion. To make real progress on
our platform, I think we need to get a clear message agreed on this
particular issue ... no matter how painful it is.


Cheers,
Mark.

[1] - Maybe I'm being too quick to ignore "let applets be implemented by
lots of different toolkits" bit. If that is truly your main reason for
wanting this change, then I apologize. We should be having an entirely
different discussion in that case.