Re: About GNOME 2.0 - The end of a dream

[Dietmar Maurer <dietmar ximian com>]

Daniel Veillard wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 16, 2001 at 10:15:57PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> >
> > Dietmar Maurer <dietmar ximian com> writes:
> > > Summary: We simply got the deep impression that you are not interested in
> > > changing anything, and that is why we started bonobo-config.
> > >
> >
> > So what you are saying is: you don't agree with me, so you wrote your
> > own thing. Fair enough. I respect your right to write a thing.
> >
> > The issue is that we can't just agree to disagree, we have to mutually
> > agree on the default database. Or at least, someone has to decide.
>
>   I think we should learn from this example. There was a disagrement,
> it was not mediated when found. Instead a new project was started,
> and it was not made obvious that the goal was to replace the initial
> work in the gnome platform (problem would have been smaller it it was
> intended as an app only development). But at the end we still need
> to resolve the issue except it's far more difficult because people
> have spent time to do the code in the meantime (and possibly rely
> on it).

The above statement give the impression that we have made some massive code
duplication, which is simply not true. Bonobo config is:

    - a CORBA API to access configuration data. It turned out that we can use
the same API to acces PropertyBag belonging to Controls, and configuration
databases. Please notice that GConf does not define a public CORBA API, so we
have zero code duplication here.

    - We have written a Moniker to access configuration data using "GConf:".
Again - zero code duplication.

    - I have written a set of PropertyEditors. GConf does not deal with such
things.

    - bonobo-config contains code to simplify the creation of configuration
dialogs - zero code duplication.

    - It contains the "xmldb:" moniker (flat database). This allows you to store
configuration data in single xml files, for example if you want to store a
backup of your setting. This was not possible with GConf. Again, zero code
duplication

    - The "xmldirdb:" moniker. About 300 lines of code (grep ";"). This was
intended as an example to show everyone how easy it is to write backends with
bonobo-config. This is the code duplication we made, only 300 LOC.

I hope that explains most things.