GNOME/Win32

[Piotr Gaczkowski <doomhammerng gmail com>]

Hello!

I would like to comment on the current situation regarding recent
efforts by Armin Burgmeier [1] and John Stowers [2].

I am deeply interested in the portability issues of GNOME Desktop.
Frankly speaking I am totally jealous towards the KDE guys. They can run
their applications wherever they like, being it Freenix, Mac OS X or
Windows.

There are some desktop apps I consider essential. One of them is, for
instance, Tomboy. And at my work, where I have to use Windows, the
Tomboy experience (a Mono app, mind you!) is really bad. I only found
some ancient installer for 0.3.5 and that's all.

As John said on his blog, there were efforts for some better GNOME/Win32
experience and I was envolved in one of them. In my opinion GNOME and
its libraries should be as easily deployed on Win32 or Mac OS X as they
are on, say, Ubuntu.

I'd like to concentrate on success stories and blockers and to sum up
the current situation. I am not really aware how it looks for KDE/Qt -
all comments about it may not be justified.

First of all the widely discussed Build Manager issue. Autotools were
meant to be portable. Unfortunately portability mainly meant cross-unix
portability. Anybody who tried to compile GTK+ natively on Windows knows
what I am talking about. Even the cross-compilation ability is crappy,
as both I and John have already mentioned.

AFAIK KDE Team uses CMake as a Build Manager. CMake also have the
ability to build RPM and Deb-packages or so I heard. Alberto have done
some job in migrating stuff to Waf. For me Waf is a possibly good
choice, beacuse it's written in the same language as jhbuild thus
minimizing dependencies.

Next step is a jhbuild itself. Running it natively on Windows with the
ability to create .msi or .msm is a lovable idea. Perhaps Ali's work
could be merged (after some work) with the trunk.

PyQt and Qt are easily deployable among platforms and so projects like
Last.Fm Player, MusicBrainz Picard or VLC Media Player like to use it.
We, the GTK+ band, don't have such abilities and so projects are running
away from our gang (okay, mostly abandoning wxWidgets in favour of Qt,
but still - not taking GTK+).

There are, though, libraries and products that have their success in
Win32 world. Libxml2 or GIMP being the cases. Still I'd love to use
Tomboy, Empathy, Epiphany and Rhythmbox native and with plugins in Win32
environment.

My question is: do you, the developers, see the need to make GNOME more
portable and more popular (think 10x10 - deadline approaching!)? Not
only among other developers but also among simple users that want to
click a Download button and have Epiphany-WebKit with all its goodness
installed. Not needing to pull lots of lots of different zip files,
manually extracting them and then doing some weird voodoo to the
environment variables whatever there are for.

For me it is certainly a point worth achieveing, especially now, for we
have more and more interest in free OSes as well as we are dropping the
dependencies on pure UNIX thingies (dbus, dconf, pulseaudio). What's
your opinion?

[1] http://arbur.net/serendipity/archives/32-Glom-on-Windows.html
[2]
http://www.johnstowers.co.nz/blog/index.php/2007/12/11/jhbuild-adventures-on-windows/

Cheers
Piotr Gaczkowski