Re: Decisions we didn't intend to make [Was: Minutes of the meeting (2006-07-31)]

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Tue, 2006-08-01 at 21:26 -0600, Elijah Newren wrote:

> Vincent was also of the same opinion.  However, I personally think
> that without this rule, community consensus was closer to not allowing
> dependencies on gtk-sharp in the desktop (or admin suite) than it was
> to allowing them.  I personally think it'd be a bad idea to drop it.

Programmers are notoriously good at coming up with impossible cases that
have nothing to do with reality ;)  Anyway, this rule is not worth
arguing about.


> We do have rules for the desktop suite that have built up over the
> years.  (The most basic being stuff like doing tarball releases on
> time, follow the freezes, etc.)  See the release-team minutes on this
> issue; we should fix this soon.

Sorry, do you mean the last set of minutes?  If it is older ones, do you
have a URL?

I'd feel a lot more comfortable if they were on the wiki :)

> > "Should we allow gtk-sharp apps in the Desktop" is the wrong question.
> >
> > "Should we allow apps which use the language bindings in the Desktop" is
> > a valid question, though a very narrow-minded one if you happen to make
> > it at all ;)  Not allowing the use of bindings in the desktop is more or
> > less the same as saying that we don't dogfood our software.
> 
> I disagree with your claims about the validity of those questions, but
> you do make a *very* persuasive argument for them.
[snip]
>(To give my personal answer to those thought experiments, I think that
> bindings without a sufficiently large community to be self supporting
> if a key individual leaves is not a good risk to take.  So, in both
> cases, I'd say leave them out until the community behind the bindings
> becomes bigger.  That's just my opinion, of course)

Gtk-sharp may be particularly controversial, but it's no more
controversial than (say) having the Java bindings.  It *is* much better
publicized, though :)

I definitely agree with you in that a binding needs to be maintained and
self-supporting in order to be worthy of consideration.  In that light,
both pygtk and gtk-sharp kick ass and even have commercial backing.

Does anyone remember that absolutely fantastic graphical debugger
written with GtkAda?  GtkAda happened due to a single, energetic,
awesome hacker whose name I forget, and the debugger happened because
his Ada-based company wanted to sell development tools.  *That* would be
a tough nut to crack if they decided to start producing really cool
desktop apps.  Fortunately they aren't ;)

> Or another example -- how about sawfish?

It's not in the same class as Tomboy.  It was pretty much
self-contained, as in "lisp is an implementation detail, and even comes
with its own interpreter".

[Also, people didn't fuss at all when we decided to use Sawfish...]

[Also, you can't beat (with-server-grabbed FORMS ...) ]

  Federico