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

["Elijah Newren" <newren gmail com>]

On 8/1/06, Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com> wrote:
> > 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 :)

Yes, the 2006-07-31 minutes.  Basically it was just this snippet I was
referring to:

+ It was pointed out that we don't have good documentation of the
 rules for the release suites, other than API/ABI rules for platform
 and bindings modules
 => Elijah volunteered to write something up

> 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 ;)

The GNU Visual Debugger?  I tried downloading it once a year or two
ago to try it out.  Didn't get it working and it didn't appear to be
maintained anymore.  Looks like its heyday was well before my time.
:(  Of course, now I'm going offtopic.  ;)

> > 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...]

Yes, I know -- things changed later.  Sawfish has been used as a
common example over the past couple years as an argument for not
allowing desktop apps to depend on bindings particularly because of
the maintainability issue.  The idea is that since everyone is
familiar with C, it's vastly easier for someone else to take over
maintainence if needed.  (Although it's quite possible that the
example has been misused, including by me -- it may have been that the
difficulty in finding others to take over was more related to the
inherent complexity in the flexibility that Sawfish had.  I'm not
sure.)  This was also related to one of the arguments used to get
python in -- tons of people know it and are using it so we should be
able to relatively easily find new maintainers if needed.