Re: Mono/GTK#/Tomboy

["Murray Cumming" <murrayc murrayc com>]

> On Fri, 14 Jul 2006, Murray Cumming wrote:
>> And while there were almost no objections to Python, there are clearly
>> many objections to Mono.
>
> What objections? So far, the only two objections I've heard are:
>
> 1. Performance -- I feel that I've addressed this in other emails.

I don't believe that you've adressed the memory problems, though these are
not specific to Mono. We maybe can handle one highlevel runtime, but 2
highlevel runtimes seems to be getting silly.

The argument that we can fix performance later is not going down well with
lots of users, though it makes sense in many ways. What do we say now to
the people who say "The sticky notes applet now takes up XX megabytes more
than before and makes GNOME start up much slower". Those people don't care
about anybody's favorite programming language.

We want to have it both ways, but we can't right now, so we must make the
difficult decision between these pros and cons. It's not helpful to
pretend that the decision doesn't exist.

Also, Tomboy is an applet, intended to replace the commonly-used sticky
notes applet, so it's likely to take up memory all the time. (I haven't
had a response to my notes->tomboy transistion questions [1] but that's a
non-mono issue.)

deskbar-applet has the same problem, of course. When we approved python I
don't think we necessarily approved this particular use. That was a
separate thing.

> 2. Vague references to TLAs such as ISV, OEM, API, ABI without refering to
> specific problems. Mono provides a very strong ABI in the base class
> libraries (we implement the same API as the .NET framework). For mono
> specific libraries, Mono commits to a similar stability level.

And you are ignoring the objections to relying on a techology that is
controlled by Microsoft, who:
 - want to destroy us, and have left open legal ways to do this.
 - have a history of being technically incompetent, .
 - have a history of ruining anything that their non-incompetent people
created, yet we must chase compatibility with them.

Not many people are bothering to repeat these problems in this thread,
because they are rather obvious and they shouldn't have to. I don't
understand why it is necessary for some people to pretend that they are
not real concerns.

I am at least glad that we have at least have a consensus that Mono will
never be used in the GNOME Platform, but as the Desktop becomes more
integrated, it will still be difficult to remove parts of it if necessary.

> Further, the objections mentioned all seem to apply equaly to python and
> mono. Python is allowed for desktop apps already. If nobody can come up
> with objections to mono that don't apply equally to python, it would seem
> that mono and python should be on equal footing.

[1]
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2006-April/msg00015.html

Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com