Re: Revisiting the Gnome Bindings

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

> Maybe you would like to make contact with the various distros,
> and/or encourage the individual bindings projects to do this.
> I have had a little success with this for gtkmm.

This should be the job of the Gnome Foundation, not yours or mine. Gnome 
Bindings is now an official Gnome Project, and so it's under the 
juristiction of the Foundation. Why do they get voted for? To simply exist?

> From their web page: "The Foundation will act as an official voice for the 
GNOME project, providing a means of communication with the press and with 
commercial and noncommercial organizations interested in GNOME software."

Where is the advocacy about the gnome-bindings and their "communication" 
about it with the distro makers? I have seen *none* such communication (and 
I would know about it if there was some, Pat from Slackware would have told 
me already)! Gnome Bindings is a big thing for Gnome, because ~1/4 of all 
the Gnome third party apps (think "platform") depend on them, and so it is a 
matter which needs attention.

Besides, *I* have done my part (yes, except cluttering Pat's mailbox asking 
him to include the bindings). I have reported via OSNews.com about the 
releases of gnome-bindings numerous times in the past, and I have urged 
distro makers to include them (we serve 190,000+ pageviews per day these 
days and I know that people from all major distros are reading it, as OSNews 
is the No2 Linux-related site behind Slashdot -- with LinuxToday and 
NewsForge following us in traffic numbers).

> I think that perl developers are familiar with using CPAN. And I think
> that might be the best way to install those bindings. I'm not an expert on
> that though.

I am talking about the users. Exactly because most distros don't package the 
bindings, the users will find themselves in need to install them by hand. 
And gtk-perl is a /nightmare/ to install properly, in particular. Ruby is 
troublesome too (or just "very different", to be more fair). Gtkmm & pygtk I 
have found them to be adequate regarding their installation routines.

Clearly, this is a job for the distro makers though. Gnome-bindings were 
meant for developers and distros, not for users (that's what you told me 
last year). So, where's that distro support a year later? Debian only 
supports it in its experimental tree, Fedora has half-packages for it, and 
many of the rest of the distros don't even know about the existance of the 
gnome-bindings!

I blame "marketing" and "distro communication" (a job that's part of 
Foundation's responsibilities), not the developers. I  read the results of 
last year's elections and except Leslie, all the rest of the people there 
are engineers or developers I believe. And engineers/devs don't have time 
for such things like "marketing", "communication" and "advocacy". It's not 
their thing (who can blame them? ;-). But bottomline is, these facts hurt 
the Foundation's goals. It is a good thing to have people who know the 
internals of Gnome on the Board, but *some* of them should be people who 
have the time to do the things that an engineer would never do. They are 
called Evangelists and they usually have some development clue.

As a Gnome user who cares about the platform, please allow me to voice a 
concern about the slow activities of the Gnome Foundation: I am not 
satisfied with the pace in the gnome-bindings situation.
Or, maybe, this is the only matter that was understimated/underplayed by the 
Foundation by mistake, in which case I apologize.

Rgds,
Eugenia

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