On Wed, 2007-11-28 at 20:03 -0500, Richard Stallman wrote: > I read http://boycottnovell.com/2007/11/05/gnome-mono-yelp/ with > great concern. > > Since I am not an expert, I cannot tell on my own if that description > of the situation is accurate. If part of it is not accurate, I hope > someone will explain. However, if it is accurate, GNOME has a serious > problem. > > I have always supported the development of free platforms for C#, just > as I've supported the development of free platforms for any language > that users use. I also wouldn't argue that people should not use C# > with a free platform for secondary applications. > > However, making GNOME depend on Mono is running a grave risk, and a > grave mistake. If the article accurately describes the situation, I > think we need to launch a high-priority project to reimplement Yelp in > some other language.
Others have commented, but here's the detailed explanation of how things work and where we're heading from somebody who actually co-maintains Yelp: Yelp currently has two backends for searching the help files on your computer: beagle and "basic". The basic search will simply ransack your hard disk every time you do a search. It's nowhere near as fast as beagle, but it does work. We want to add support for Tracker as a search backend. Tracker is implemented in good old C, and it finally seems to be getting some uptake. It just takes some manpower. We do not want to be in the business of maintaining our own indexer, and we believe the Gnome platform should be providing that for us. As for dependencies, Yelp has a configure-time option: --with-search=basic|beagle|auto auto (the default) will build Beagle support iff beagle is found on your system. Even when compiled with Beagle support, Yelp will still fall back to basic search if Beagle can't be found at run time. I believe we've done a good job of providing useful functionality without being able to depend on functionality that really should be a part of our platform. (And by "we", I mostly mean my fellow co-maintainer, Don.) The fact that this results in a hard dependency for some binary packages is really outside what we do. And all of this could have been explained just as simply if the folks at boycottnovell.com had simply emailed us and asked for details, instead of posting unsubstantiated drivel. -- Shaun _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list