Re: Putting the 'Mono debate' back on the rails

[David Nielsen <david lovesunix net>]

man, 24 07 2006 kl. 16:47 +0100, skrev Ghee Teo Sun COM:
> Iain * wrote:
> 
> >>    The other example is gstreamer, I am sure they can share with us 
> >> whether
> >> their decision to go with parallel-installable version of 0.8 and 
> >> 0.10 was a
> >> pleasant exercise. Of course they were facing similar situations as 
> >> is now.
> >
> >
> > Speaking as aGStreamer application author and user, it was very
> > pleasent. It allowed me to use applications that had been ported to
> > 0.10 and applications that had not...all at the same time!
> 
>     Good :).
>     But for how long? 6 months, 1 year or 3 years? I guess you don't to 
> want to
> do that for very long :) or many versions.

For as long as it takes for the applications to be ported or replaced
with ones that use the new superior technology. Users will encourage a
port if the functionality of the programs based on the newer instance is
better, they will want what that adds in the applications that don't
take advantage of it. We saw this with the GTK1 to GTK2 transition, sure
it took a while but in the end most applications have either died out
for lack of use (and been replaced with other ones if needed) or been
ported because that turned out the best possible solution.

You don't see many people saying, I'm going to develop a kickass
application and I'm going to use GTK1 for the interface anymore - we've
all realized that GTK2 is better for all involved.

The upcoming release of Fedora finally managed to push GTK1 entirely out
of the Core distribution, it took a while but it's inevitable progress. 

Smaller changes that the toolkit transition will of course take less
time, gstreamer 0.10 adaption has taken surprisingly short time, I
believe out of all the application I use only Thoggen has yet to be
ported. The same should happen with the bindings.

So long as we don't break things for the user it should matter much
while the change happens. Parallel installability makes this possible.

- David Nielsen