Re: EEL vs. GAL

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

mawarkus t-online de (Matthias Warkus) writes:
> 
> I notice that there are now two libraries with the same purpose in
> GNOME CVS: EEL and GAL. Both are free and open, but essentially
> libraries created to optimise code reuse inside a certain company (and
> its associated community of external developers), not inside the GNOME
> community as a whole.
> 
> Am I the only one to think this is suboptimal?
> 
> EEL and GAL should merge. Both intend to be some kind of "libgnomeui
> level 2" -- why not go ahead and just do it?
> 

As Maciej says, the way to merge is by slowly migrating things into
released/supported libs.

EEL/GAL are "internal use only" experimental libs. This means they can
be on weird release schedules and break things according to the needs
of apps such as Evolution and Nautilus, and it means some bad hacks
and unfinished stuff can be in them.  So these libs are not meant to
be shared really; they aren't supported in that respect.

Remember: software product system = 9 times the effort of just plain software. 

When people feel something in EEL/GAL is really mature and of general
interest, they should write it up in detail, and propose its inclusion
in one of the platform libraries such as gtk, bonobo, gnome-libs, then
go through an iterative refinement process with the maintainer of the
platform lib, and get it included eventually.

Anyhow, IMHO it's absolutely correct to have these kinds of libs where
we can prototype stuff. It's wrong to try to put everything in a
supported platform from the start. Let it mature first.

Havoc