On Wed, 2006-07-19 at 10:50 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote: > A fucking amazing platform isn't an accident, and we need a fucking amazing > platform to bring more developers to GNOME - both internal developers and > external developers. One of our *crucial* audiences must be FLOSS hackers > and ISDs. If we don't satisfy them, we can't build our own momentum for > building this amazing software stack, and we can't build an ecosystem with > opportunities for everyone else.
The GNOME platform is pretty much *done* at this point from the viewpoint of "what more code do we need?". - We have support for most human languages. - We have a tremendously powerful and rich GUI toolkit. - We (finally!) have a printing API that doesn't suck. - We have excellent accessibility at the toolkit level. - We have a good way to store configuration data. - We have a rich multimedia API. - etc. In terms of code and APIs, we are *done*. If you remember the Advisory Board meeting at GUADEC, what ISDs asked for was not more APIs, but the "polish" things: - High-level documentation (not done) - Overviews of the platform (done! Thanks, Shaun!) - Detailed descriptions of the platform's architecture (not done) - Stability guarantees (in progress) - "Official" word on which API you should use for what (in progress) - Performance tuning to make the platform leaner (in progress) Let me repeat: the platform is *DONE* in terms of code. We need the fit and finish now. Paint, polish, varnish, carpeting, and a nice glossy pamphlet to guide you through the beautiful building that is our architecture. Gaudà would be proud of its organic nature. [If you want to be pedantic and are looking for missing APIs, you can count them on even less than four toes: a lockdown API instead of reading ill-documented GConf keys, and oh, screw it, I can't think of any others right now.] GNOME is a *great* platform to build desktop-ish apps *right now*. That's our platform's space. People who get scared that "Web 2.0" is going to replace us need to remember that the web needs a good web browser to run on, and that web browser needs a toolkit to be written in, and that toolkit is GNOME. It's there right now and it works. All the advancements in software for end users are happening elsewhere: in the web, and in high-level languages. That's fine. That stuff also needs a desktop-ish foundation to be built upon, and that foundation is GNOME. Only people who haven't written large-scale software think that it can be written efficiently in a low-level language. That's why most of the programming world is moving to high-level stuff: it's why companies write their internal software in Java, why Microsoft is writing their new software in C#, why all the cool/new end-user apps in free software are using Python and C# and Java... and you know what? Under all that high-level amazing stuff lies a foundation pretty much like GNOME: let that be the historic Win32 (in C and assembler since 1983, baby!), the historic Apple libraries (all the way from NextStep!), or GTK+ (11 years old!) and libgnome* themselves (almost 10 years old now!). Federico _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list