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

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

On 18Sep2001 02:11PM (-0500), Bill Gribble wrote:
> 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".  

A "platform library" is one we commit to support as part of the
platform and recomment to internal developers. Some aspects of this
include committing to total source and binary compatibility within a
major GNOME platform version, and licensing suitable for use by both
free software and proprietary software. 

But even in the case of libraries whose maintainers are willing to
meet these criteria, we may not want to include them if we don't feel
they are mature enough, if they duplicate functionality already in the
platform, if they do not interoperate well with other parts of the
platform, etc.

> 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. 

People should not use gal unless they are willing to live with the
possibility of API breakage at any time.

> 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.

We're also not including eel, librsvg, GStreamer or other libraries
whose maintainers are not ready to commit to source/binary compat,
even though they are used by numerous apps and in some cases by parts
of the core desktop. Just to make clear that `gal' is not being
arbitrarily singled out.

Regards,

Maciej