Re: communication/information between forward-looking projects [was Re: Some info (Ref: GSOC 2008 advice)]

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

On Mon, 2008-03-03 at 09:50 -0500, Luis Villa wrote:

> "The GNOME community is strongly against anything that can be thought
> of as "GNOME 3.0.""
> 
> I don't think that's correct, for a number of reasons. First, it
> assumes that the broad GNOME community has one opinion on GNOME 3.0,
> which is anything but the case- there is a lot of disagreement on the
> issue. Second, if there is any one thing which is agreed on, I think
> it would be less 'no GNOME 3.0' and more 'no 3.0 for the sake of 3.0'.
> In other words, if someone can come up with something that truly
> improves the *user* experience (*not* the developer experience) then
> that should at least be considered as the core of a new GNOME.

What most of the developers agree on is that we don't want yet another
major version bump that means all apps using GNOME platform need to be
practically rewritten, like the gtk 1.2 -> gtk2 transition.  You still
see great apps using the old gtk eight years later.  That's what we know
wouldn't work.

If you look at the GNOME 2 offerings, we have done some major
restructuring and cleaning without having to break anything in any major
way.  We've come up with cairo and pushed it beneath pango and gtk+.
Introduced gstreamer all over the stack.  Switched to gtk-printing.
Switching to gio/gvfs right now.  That's the kind of reason why people
get on the defensive when someone say GNOME 3.0, because more often than
not it means they just have a version number in mind, and no real plans.
Like they say, version numbers are cheap, show me the code :P.


-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/

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