Re: Proposing gobby?

[Davyd Madeley <davyd madeley id au>]

On Tue, 2005-11-15 at 19:15 +0100, Philipp Kern wrote:

> > Collaborative editing is an application many people don't seem to have
> > realised is possible with their computers; I think having it available
> > such that two GNOME users can easily start a collaborative session
> > together would be massively beneficial.

I agree that this is a very cool and useful feature.

> I agree, and I also thought about asking for integration. It's just  
> that Gnome already has GEdit as a general purpose editor. It's sad  
> that the plugin architecture just wasn't good enough for us when we  
> started the project. It seemed easier to actually reinvent the wheel.

This suggests that the gedit plugin architecture today could be used to
implement a collaborative editor on top of libobby, is that the case?

> We release a new candidate, 0.3.0rc1, today and 0.3.0 will be ready  
> within the next weeks. There are some rumours that there are some  
> users even in the Free Software Foundation.

Gobby is a very cool application, but I don't think it is a good
candidate for Desktop. Not in its current state.

The litmus test for inclusion should not be "this application is cool",
but "is this application useful to everyone and does it integrate
tightly".

By including gobby into the desktop, we now have an ordinary editor and
a collaborative editor. This will only serve to highlight a lack of
integration and people would only ask why we couldn't have an 'Edit
Together' button in the text editor.

Standing on its own, it does not have that problem.

I want to reiterate again, that inclusion in Desktop is not the most
mighty goal a project can achieve. I think we can still give excellent
press through GNOME Journal "Application in Focus" articles which we
then link off the main page of the website. We could do this for a
number of applications: F-spot, Beagle, Gobby, Gossip, Banshee...
anything that is currently popular. Perhaps in an interview format with
one or many of the developers.

In summary: Gobby application: excellent. Gobby technology: excellent.
Having two text editors in GNOME: not excellent.

-- 
Davyd Madeley

http://www.davyd.id.au/
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