Re: Platform

[Stefan Kost <ensonic hora-obscura de>]

Shaun McCance schrieb:
> Hey folks,
> 
> I'm taking a hard look at the Platform Overview and how we
> can improve our message to ISDs through better documentation.
> Our release sets, unfortunately, don't really reflect what we
> really recommend to developers.  That role has more or less
> been delegated to the Platform Overview.
> 
> The problem is that what's in the Platform Overview is based
> entirely on what I happened to think was worth mentioning at
> some point.  I should not be the arbiter of our platform.
> 
> I would like to get people's opinions on what technologies
> we should be pushing.  I'm interested both in the here and
> now and in what people think the Gnome 3 message should be.
> 
> I've organized my thoughts into three categories: Platform
> contains technologies that are currently in our Developer
> Platform release; Recommended contains thing that we seem
> to agree we should push, but are either in the Desktop
> release or just in our external dependencies; and Others
> contains stuff that I think is cool and could be part of
> our core offering some time in the indeterminate future.
> 
> The list is what came to mind as I was writing this email.
> Please feel free to discuss libraries I forgot.
> 
> 
> Platform
> ========
> 
> GTK+ -- The core of how we make graphical applications.
> 
> Pango -- Internationalized text rendering system.  You
> love it and you know it.
> 
> GLib -- The foundation for pretty much everything we do.
> 
> GIO -- Part of GLib, but worth a separate mention in the
> Platform Overview.
> 
> GConf -- Configuration system.  There is talk of a new
> system (see below).  But I think it's obvious that we need
> to be pushing something here.  So as long as GConf is what
> we have, it's what we push.
> 
> ATK -- Accessibility toolkit.  Used by GTK+.  Should be
> used by anything else that does UIs.
> 
> 
> Recommended
> ===========
> 
> Cairo -- Incredible drawing library, used by GTK+.  There
> seems to be general agreement that developers should use
> Cairo when they need to do custom drawing.
> 
> GStreamer -- All things multimedia.  I don't think there's
> any argument against GStreamer being the Gnome-blessed way
> to do multimedia.
> 
> D-Bus -- Inter-process messaging system.  Lots of stuff is
> built on it.  How much do we want to push it directly?
> 
> Avahi -- Service discovery.  This is used in quite a few
> places.  I know some people in the past had talked about
> having a simple wrapper in GLib.  How much do we push it?
> 
Now that apple has closed the whole bonjour stack, I would prefer to build on
upnp. We have gupnp, which is actively developed and fitting nicely here.

Stefan