Time for me to say something

[Brad Hards]

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On Wed, 4 Feb 2004 15:33 pm, Daniel Stone wrote:
> So, I guess I should say something. The reaction from the KDE side, as
> best I can tell from kde-core-devel archives and various postings/IRC
> messages everywhere, is that more clarification is needed. So, this mail
> is just stepping through and clarifying various stuff, for the time
> being.
- From jdub's talk at LCA:
KDE == cautiously pessamistic?
Gnome == incautiously delerious?

> There also seems to be the impression that the platform is set in stone
> and there's a conspiracy to force stuff on people. It's not. I'm not
> here to dictate[1] - I'm here to consult, first. There are some very
> core items I have decided upon, but the rest is open. The only core
> items I have are xlibs, D-BUS and Cairo.
It might be worth explaining why those things (and also, why not others).

> I also have some questions: where do people feel the relevance in the
> platform lies? Which modules should be in? How often should releases be
> made? et cetera.
I'm thinking that some of the really common libs are also worth packaging, 
even if you don't hold them locally. bzlib, libpng, that sort of thing. Given 
a kernel, a compiler and libc, get the stuff I'm going to need to build KDE 
or Gnome. OK, so it won't be that clear....

Does Gnome have a pre-requisites list? If so, the intersection of that list 
and http://www.kde.org/info/requirements/3.2.php is probably a good start.

> OK, so here are the list of proposed modules:
>   * xlibs:
>     + freedesktop.org xlibs. Forked from XFree86 some time ago, working
>       on merging in XFree86 changes between then and the license change.
>       Not affected by the license change. Plans to remain with the same
>       license. Work underway to trim down the size of codebase, open to
>       new enhancements upon request. Recently released 1.0, most major
>       distros plan for adoption at some stage.
Just to be clear, does this mean only Xlib? Or other standard X libraries as 
well?
Needs a strong maintainer. Who ya got?

>   * xserver:
But probably not first time around?

>   * D-BUS:
Needed.

>   * HAL:
Probably a bit early. Also, what about udev?

>   * Cairo:
I liked it too, but it isn't clear where it is going to fit into KDE. Probably 
needs to mature - maybe a couple of separate releases?

>   * XDG/Startup-Notification/Systray/etc.
>     + Various freedesktop.org standards. Every desktop should (and does,
>       pretty much) support these.
What does that look like in code terms? 

> There are more, which seem to be controversial, so I'll gether them and
> start separate threads. Or, if anyone wants to start *separate* threads
> on scrollkeeper/intltool, please feel free.
Package it separately, call it optional, and tell people to FOAD if they get 
too upset by the label.

Other stuff to think about / discuss:
MIME .desktop files?
Freetype?
Fonts?
XML (libxml/libxslt) libs?
OpenGL?

Brad
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