Revisiting the Gnome Bindings

["Eugenia Loli-Queru" <eloli hotmail com>]

When the Gnome Bindings Project came about at the end of last year, I was 
very excited about it. Really excited in fact, as there are many gtkmm or 
perl apps gtk apps around (and even more pygtk ones).

But 10 months later, I haven't seen a *single* distro that has packaged the 
gnome-bindings the way everyone expected. Sure, Fedora includes pygtk and 
gtkmm, but I don't think they did so with the gnome-bindings in mind. The 
whole point of creating the bindings was so bindings had a common point of 
release in conjuction to gnome releases for more consistency, and also that 
distros would pick them up and package them/include them on their distros.

In my mind, the whole thing has been a 'marketing' failure so far (by no 
means a developer's failure). The Gnome project has failed to properly 
advocate and present the importance of the bindings to the distro/OS makers, 
and so nothing has changed for the uses, as they have to compile them by 
hand as they did so far. As I have said in the past, most non-RedHat distro 
makers tend to install without second thought whatever comes by default with 
a DE, but they are very reluctant to install anything "third party" (e.g. 
Evolution before its gnome inclusion, gnome-bindings are also considered 
'third party').

Because of the reasons explained above, I would like to ask to either 
include gtkmm, pygtk, perl, ruby, java (and maybe mono in the future) in the 
core release (as long these developers can follow the gnome pace). And yes, 
I understand that this is a no-go situation currently, however I have little 
choice but suggest it.

OR, do something about it just so it gets the attention of the distro 
makers. Because the way it is now, the users get nothing out of it. The 
developers do get something from the gnome-bindings thing, but developers 
exist so they can create applications. If these applications don't run on 
most Linuxes/BSDs, that's ultimately a loss for Gnome/GTK+. And don't expect 
users to go hunt for things like the perl-gtk bindings in particular, which 
are a real pain in the bum to understand how they work and install them 
properly.

I believe the gnome-bindings situation needs immediate revisiting and 
discussion. I love them. But I can't help noticing the fact that they have 
no impact to distro makers and so GTK+ users are suffering because of this: 
Gnomefiles is full of pygtk apps for example.

Rgds,
Eugenia

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