Re: OO as GNOME software (topic change)



On Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 11:43:54PM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> Sam TH <sam uchicago edu> writes:
> > 
> > If, tommorow, KWord (or Eterm, or what have you) decided to claim that
> > it was GNOME software, and wanted to be in the release, what would
> > people say?  People would say that it didn't interoperate with GNOME,
> > that it didn't use GTK, that it didn't have anything to do with GNOME
> > at all, really.  If they wanted to be part of the release, we would
> > want a reason.  
> > 
> > So, the question seems to be, given that any other application like
> > OpenOffice wouldn't be in the release, and that we would be upset
> > about it claiming GNOME imprimatur without any real association, why
> > is OpenOffice getting both?  
> 
> Well, I'm not sure OpenOffice will be in the release - it isn't in
> 1.4, and presumably would go through the same process as anything else
> to be in 2.0.

Wait a second:

On Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 08:42:26PM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> If you mean the GO vs. OpenOffice discussion, the board did make a
> final decision to just include both and not worry about trying to
> decide this issue for or against either suite in any way.

That sounds like including OpenOffice to me.  Am I just confused?

> 
> I don't know what that process says about use or non-use of GTK.
> 
> Honestly if any program is really interested in working with GNOME and
> is a useful program and does interoperate in a reasonable way, I'm not
> sure I have much objection ot it, and I think that was the general
> view at the board meeting that talked about this. At the same time
> people did see value in using GTK and other aspects of GNOME Office,
> and thought a lot of users might like that more than OpenOffice. So
> it's kind of a "leave it up to the users" policy. 
> 

So, the criteria you just laid out are:

1. really interested in working with GNOME
Presumably, OO fills this by working on the UNO-Bonobo bridge.

2. is a useful program
Not really that hard to meet

3. does interoperate in a reasonable way
This will be filled by said bridge (does that work yet?)

Ok, here's another example.  Keith Packard has on his TODO list (I
think he's kidding about this, but still) making twm GNOME/KDW WM
compliant.  At that point, twm would be about as far towards meeting
your three criteria as OpenOffice is now (or as KDevelop is now, as
Seth pointed out).  Would it make the cut?

> > If you want to be specific, what other non-GTK applications are being
> > considered for a GNOME release?  
> 
> Well, Nautilus uses MOzilla, and we do use a lot of libs that aren't
> particularly G-ified such as image libs, libxml, popt, libart, etc.

Well, I meant "applications" in the "not including libraries" sense
(it would be hard to use GTK in libxml).

And Nautilus uses the rendering engine from Mozilla, not the GUI,
right?  So all the widgets on screen are still GTK widgets?

> 
> Some anti-GNOME "advocates" post stuff such as "GNOME can't even write
> its own [whatever]" - these people are IMHO morons - NIH syndrome is
> bad, not good. ;-) Interoperability is good. Shared code is
> good. MOdularity is good. The GNOME project is about usability for
> free software operating systems, it's not about putting the GNOME logo
> all over everything.

Well, I hope you aren't accusing me of NIH syndrome, given where I
come to this debate from.  AbiWord is just as much NIH as OpenOffice.
But we've put in lots of work to interoperate with GNOME, to have the
GNOME look and feel, etc.  

NIH is bad.  But interface consistency in project that's about
"usability for free software operating systems" is good.  
           
	sam th		     
	sam uchicago edu
	http://www.abisource.com/~sam/
	GnuPG Key:  
	http://www.abisource.com/~sam/key

Attachment: pgpKb62kSscZV.pgp
Description: PGP signature



[Date Prev][Date Next]   [Thread Prev][Thread Next]   [Thread Index] [Date Index] [Author Index]