Re: more gnome 2 proposal

[jacob berkman <jacob ximian com>]

On 13 Mar 2001 15:24:40 +0100, Martin Baulig wrote:
> Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com> writes:
> 
> > Your proposal does not seem to realize the importance of having a
> > component technology at the core of the system, nor that a unified set
> > of libraries would ease a lot of the cross-dependencies and the fact
> > that many times we are just plain blocked from using functionality in
> > another module because of the dependencies we have.  I understand that
> > you and Owen want to build a new component system, and hence
> > integrating Bonobo would be a step in the wrong direction for you.
> 
> While writing our proposal we were merely looking at what we have now
> where we want to go for GNOME 2.0. I mean, we have GNOME 1.4 now and we
> just don't have the time to completely rewrite all of gnome-libs - I
> don't know what you and Jacob mean with integrating gnome-libs and Bonobo,
> but for this sounds like a complete rewrite.

(i am typing this with the sincerest of tones, so truly and honestly
please read them with that in mind, even though my words may sound
harsh-ish.  email sucks)

since you say you don't really understand the gnome-libs / bonobo stuff,
i will try to explain furthur some of my (and our) reasoning and
thinking.

with the 1.4 release, the technologies like bonobo, gnome-vfs, nautilus,
etc. are released as a stable platform.  this is more-or-less the "old"
gnome 2.0 plan, except still with the 1.0 api of gnome-libs.

with the newer plan, gnome 2.0 becomes basically this ported to gtk 2.0.
While this is ok, it really doesn't go towards the goal of a free
software based component model for unix.

which brings up the question of "what are people's goals for 2.0?"

i am honestly curious about what others' goals are, because i don't know
that we've talked about this much, and i think i would like to a bit.

i can, however, talk about what my goals are.  i believe these are on
the same track as miguel's and other people on the labs team  ximian,
but honestly (really) on the technological merits of our goals and *not*
because we all work together and doing so directly helps our company.
it indirectly does, we believe, by making gnome a stronger platform for
developing advanced, maintainable, and modern applications in the unix
environment.

so, yeah.  what i want to see is gnome (finally) become a system based
on components.  there are many many reasons why this is advantagous.
there are many books on COM which can describe some of the benefits of
developing software with components.  there are also things that they do
not bring up which affect us on linux/unix, such as making the
dependency tree more flexible by defining the interfaces at a lower
level, and doing the implementations separately so that they are free to
have dependencies change etc.

bonobo brings (at least) two things into this.  first, it brings in the
main component model.   this would be the non-X part of bonobo.  it also
brings in the UI parts.  these include, to a large extent, code built
upon/from the GnomeApp idea, extended to work with embedded components
(and compound documents).  this being the case, the less flexible
GnomeApp is of considerable less value than it was when gnome
development started.

the problem we have with going with a component based desktop is that we
have not bootstrapped it yet.  i believe that components are like nodes
on a network in that the value of the system as a whole grows
exponentially with the number of things inside it.

basically, for the component based system to work, we need a rich
component base.

which means we need to start serious development devoted to developing
and using components.

a fortunate thing is that this work can be done based on what's
available with gnome 1.4.  we can also do this based on the currently
proposed gnome 2 plan, using the current bonobo ported to gtk 2.  this
lets us not require the large scale componentization for gnome 2, but
allows it to be rolled in soon after, or at least sooner than the gnome
3 platform release.  which is important, since the sooner we have a
component solution the better off we are.

so, the gnome-libs/bonobo merge stemmed from the facts that bonobo is
the basis of the future of gnome, and that a good portion of libgnomeui
is obsoleted by the code in bonobo.  providing one library here instead
of two (gnomeui and bonoboui) presents a clearer and more
straightforward approach for developers, both external and internal.
this also eases somewhat the dependency tree, but that is only a
secondary and minor win.

i do think that we can go towards this goal with the current gnome-libs
2 proposal.  even though i don't feel it is the ideal situation, i am
more than willing to comprimise here if it helps get everyone on the
same page and finally working on gnome 2.

so, i hope this helps you (and everyone else) understand what we are
trying to accomplish, and why.

with love as always,
jacob
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