Re: Question for Bastian Nocera

[Richard Stallman <rms gnu org>]

    > Also, if Linux is part of GNOME, that would imply it is part of GNU.
    > I don't think we want to imply that conclusion.

    I guess that you misunderstood my original mail.

That is possible.

						     We need to be able to
    drain the swamp, and fix problems that occur at any point in the
    infrastructure between the bottom level (in most cases, the kernel), and
    the top level (us, GNOME).

I agree it is desirable -- but it may be difficult, since we don't
maintain those other programs.

When program A works with B and C, there may be problems that are
first reported for A, but whose best fix involves changing B and C.
So the maintainers of A need to talk with the maintainers of B and C
to get the fixes made.  These situations are often complex.  When A
works badly due to an inconvenience with B that the maintainers of B
don't want to change (or that they will change, but it will take a
year to release the changed version), the best solution actually
possible is sometimes make a workaround in A for it.

    Do we want to spend time being held back by the missing infrastructure
    on other OSes than Linux? The large majority of contributors use Linux,
    and we'd like to be able to not get held back.

The large majority of them use GNU/Linux.  Linux is a kernel and won't
run by itself.

    I don't think it's that much of a stretch for us to say "[GNU/Linux] is the
    platform we care about, but we'd love to see patches for other
    platforms". Because that's what is already happening, just without the
    rubber stamp.

I agree.

It's proper for GNOME development to focus on using GNOME within
GNU, because that's the primary goal: make GNU better.
In practice, this means GNU running on Linux, so Linux can be
assumed too.

Support for other platforms is something that can be done
when it seems worth the trouble, but it's not a primary goal.