Re: Athena User Interface Project seeks advice

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@eazel.com> writes: 
> MIT is very different than an ISV. They are not generating stuff for
> shipping to the public on stock red hat, they want to deploy to their
> won environment. They can force people to install or upgrade new
> packages to use their stuff if they want. Therefore I would suggest
> they feel free to use things that are slated to be added to the GNOME
> 1.0 platform even before those things are added.
> 

As long as they realize that the unreleased stuff can and will change,
breaking their code, and that there will be no officially-supported
upgrade path or documentation to lessen the impact of the
changes. i.e. it's a totally unsupported moving target that can cause
major pain. There's also no guarantee of a minimum quality level; the
unreleased stuff may well have tons of bugs.

If people are willing to live with pain and mess in order to get the
latest features then cool, but I don't want to hear any whining about
bugs or changing interfaces!

(Also, seriously, if you are trying to develop or deploy software on a
deadline, a moving target is super-evil and makes it impossible to do
so. So even though they aren't requiring stock Red Hat, I think it
would be sensible to decide on their target platform now and stick to
it until deadlines are met, assuming there are deadlines. Eazel can
only get away with this for Nautilus because the moving libraries are
part of the software being developed, and you have direct and
within-minutes control over said libraries and access to their
maintainers.)

Havoc