Re: Time to heat up the new module discussion

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

On Thu, 2006-07-13 at 10:28 +0100, Alvaro Lopez Ortega wrote:
>   It is a very different situation. While the power manager support
>   provides new functionality, GTK# would only provide duplicate
>   functionality for another development framework that overlaps with
>   GNOME.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding, but this argument doesn't make any sense
to me.

Gtk# isn't an application, so by itself it's not useful and doesn't
really duplicate anything.  It does provide a native API to Gtk#, but
traditionally language bindings have been considered a strength of
GNOME.  Gtk# calls into Gtk+, so it's not like we have two competing
implementations of the toolkit here.  I don't see the duplicate
functionality here.

>   We should not even care about which one is less hoggy.  This is a
>   base problem: "Do we need two (or more) development frameworks for a
>   single desktop?".
> 
>   My opinion is no, we don't. But anyway, if in the worst case we end
>   up using another one, lets ensure it's that, another one, not two or
>   three of them.

It makes increasingly less sense to write applications in C.  If you
look at where the interesting and innovative development has been in
terms of applications in GNOME, virtually zero of them are C apps.
They're all either Python or Mono.  This isn't a coincidence.

(Yes, there is a bit of an exception here for the lighterweight apps on
the 770, but those are quite rightly applications designed to be better
suited for smaller devices.)

>   http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,1820607,00.asp
> 
> ======
> Everything in Longhorn was supposed to be written in C# and to be
> managed code. But managed code was going to require machines that
> weren't going to be available for five years or more. So now Microsoft
> is rewriting everything in Longhorn, the developer says. Developers
> claim that the Windows team actually began rethinking Microsoft's .Net
> Framework
> ======
> 
>   As Darren said, why do we think we will do any better?

I would take anything you read on microsoft-watch.com with a huge grain
of salt.  What about managed code is going to require machines that
aren't going to be available for "five years or more"?  Without more
information, we can't make any use of this information and it amounts to
FUD.

Distributions today are quite successfully shipping with a wide variety
of Python and Mono applications.  Are we satisfied with their
performance on a P3 with 128 megs of RAM?  Probably not, but these are
things we can actively address.  I am quite thrilled that "Performance"
is becoming one of the core values of GNOME development.

Joe