Deskbar experience (was: Mono/GTK#/Tomboy)

[Raphael Slinckx <raphael slinckx net>]

Hi !

> In all honesty, I see Python as being popular for short lived applications 
> (a menu editor, etc). While deskbar is contrary to this, that applet seems 
> to be more of a prototype (especially given it's memory usage).

I like to consider deskbar as a prototype too.

Keep in mind however that nobody has yet proposed me to rewrite it in C,
i certainly don't have time nor will to do it myself, and i would loose
my two other developers because of that, leaving deskbar with no
maintainers.

It's easy to say let's first write it in python/whatever highlevel
language, then port it to C for performance or memory usage.
The reality is that you either spend your time in fixing actual bugs or
adding new features that are worth it (and python/foobar makes this
really easy). Given that spending more time in porting with no added
benefit beside hypothetical memory/speed, and loosing with that process
maybe half of the bugfixing time spent earlier, without mentioning that
you have now a beautiful C code, that nobody want to touch and you get
no more contributions.

So you end up with two choice accepting that less people want to create
and maintain C applications than before and including applications like
deskbar. Or deciding that you don't care about new innovative
applications (and i'm not saying that) just because they are written in
a language that eats memory (given the present RAM value, running
deskbar costs approximately $2 which is even less if you are in
europe :)) and loose the wow factor, and the people working on those,
because not being acknowledged by GNOME when you do gnome applications
sucks.

$2 is a price i'm willing to pay to run deskbar, by the way.

Raf