How does Project Ridley affect ISV's?

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

I have been following the Project Ridley discussion on desktop-devel-list and
also the website on live.gnome.org, and I think that this is a real positive
move.  Once completed, I think GNOME will have a much better ISV story.
That said, I have a couple of questions/comments that I hope can be better
clarified.

Looking at the GNOME Release team website:

   http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/tasks.html

The description of "GNOME Platform" seems to say "The GNOME Platform libraries
provides APIs on which GNOME applications can be developed.  They make a 
commitment to API and ABI stability within minor GNOME releases (e.g. all
GNOME 2.x releases)."

This seems to suggest that the current GNOME Platform libraries will
be supported as long as GNOME remains at 2.x.  Does this mean that when
Project Ridley is done that GNOME will become 3.x and the deprecated
interfaces will be removed from GNOME, or is the plan to keep GNOME at
the 2.x level and the deprecated libraries will continue to be supported
even after Project Ridley is released?  Or is the plan something else?

While Project Ridley will greatly reduce the number of libraries in
the GNOME Platform, I'm guessing that there will be some GNOME-specific
libraries (such as GConf and gnome-vfs) that will remain in the
Platform.  Is this correct, and will these libraries be recommended for
ISV use or are these libraries really only intended for use within the
GNOME project itself?

I also wonder about bonobo and ORBit2.  In talking with Glynn and others
within the GNOME community, I understand that there is a push to also
rid the GNOME stack of these dependencies.  However, I notice that
at-spi has a strong dependancy on both and expose bonobo and ORBit2
interfaces in the at-spi header files.  In talking with Bill Haneman,
he said that he was not aware of a push to remove these interfaces,
and that he has trouble imagining how GNOME can continue to support
accessibility if they were removed.  I understand that bonobo can
be removed from the panel, nautilus, evolution, and other programs
because they can be rewritten to avoid needing process-to-process
communication.  However, AT programs (such as GOK and Gnopernicus)
rely on bonobo's process-to-process communication in order to
provide their accessibility features.

If bonobo and ORBit are not really considered stable and supported
GNOME interfaces, this means that either at-spi needs a lot of work
to remove or hide these dependencies, or that GNOME does not really
support the writing of AT programs.  Considering that a11y is one of
the features that really makes GNOME stand out as a UNIX desktop, it
would be a shame if a11y is not a supported feature.  Also, other UI
environments (such as KDE and Java) utilize the at-spi interfaces
to provide accessibility, so not considering these stable could
cause problems outside the GNOME stack.

Does the release team have any feeling for which GNOME libraries
will remain in the platform after Project Ridley and which libraries
will continue to be supported?

Brian