Re: FW: Nautilus and Setup Tools

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Jody Goldberg <jgoldberg home com> writes: 
> That is a laudable goal.  Is there any chance of this happening ?
> There appear to be alot of obstacles.  Frankly I'd prefer to see
> a potentially gnome specific solution if it could be done within our
> lifetimes. 

Sure, I agree with that. Some points though.
 
 a) it is definitely not ideal, and should not be considered the "in
    principle" right thing, and we should realize the real user and
    developer problems it creates
 
 b) we can frequently do a solution ourselves, that is not blatantly
    and gratuitously gnome-specific. e.g. avoid the huge library
    stack, call it something other than gnome-<whatever>, at least
    post to xdg-list with a design spec as an "FYI" - none of that 
    keeps anyone from doing it in our lifetime. ;-)

 c) we can frequently migrate to a real solution over time, 
    even while using a GNOME-specific one short-term. Example:
    GNOME WM hints to new standard WM hints.

Yes, it would be easier if we had some high-levelish object/type
system stuff shared with KDE. Still, it's not impossible to make
progress.

Basically I think it's bogus to claim that a gnome-specific solution
is hugely faster. Especially since for many cases (e.g. clipboards and
I'd argue fonts), a gnome-specific solution is by definition a bad
solution, because one of the big user problems to be solved is
interoperability between all apps. i.e. gnome-specific collides with a
key design requirement in many cases.

> A cardinal rule of development would seem to apply :
> 
>     It is easier to ask contrition than permission
> 
> Specify a decent mechanism and possibly it will be adopted
> by other projects.

Unless it's pointlessly gnome-specific as lots of our stuff is.

In the fonts case, there are clearly people willing to work on the
problem (Keith at least), they have asked for help, we have good
contacts in Mozilla, AbiWord, and OpenOffice, in addition to X, the
config file format is being rewritten anyway, Xft is already new and
we already have to wait for deployment, most involved parties are
using FreeType as underlying technology...

All the pieces are there. We just need someone with a bit of time to
make some effort to put them together.

Havoc