Re: GNOME 2.0 Platform Alpha Deadline - Sep 26, 2001

[Bill Gribble <grib linuxdevel com>]

On Tue, 2001-09-18 at 13:28, Maciej Stachowiak wrote: 
> GAL is a non-API-committed library and contains GPL code, for both of
> these reasons it is not suitable as a platform library.

Hm.  Well, then I guess you'll have to explain the utility of the
concept of "platform library" to me.  I had thought the "platform" was
the standard set of stuff you need to build or install Gnome apps, 
and that the released versions of the "platform libraries" would be the
major lib versions that everybody needs to keep installed in order to
say that they are shipping "GNOME 2.0".  

libgal gets linked into just about any major app you compile using Gnome
these days, and the non-standardization of libgal as a part of the
"platform" is the single biggest problem I have seen people have with
installing and building for Gnome.  It's been part of the de facto
"platform" since before the release of GNOME 1.4, IIRC, and it just
doesn't make sense to me that it is not on this list for the next major
version. 

If the license terms aren't acceptable, that's perfectly understandable,
but it seems to me that libgal is a part of the "GNOME 2.0 platform"
whether you call it that or not.  It's in the best interests of GNOME
users and developers that a version of libgal be standardized so that
developers can use it with some confidence after the release of GNOME
2.0.  

I don't mean that nobody can use a newer version than whatever is
shipped with GNOME 2.0, but that any distributor who claims to be
distributing GNOME-2.0 must have the standard version installed in
addition to any newer version. 

b.g.