Thoughts and a possible plan

[Aaron J. Seigo]

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On March 11, 2004 09:05, Mike Hearn wrote:
> > I don't think this is what we want; the idea of the freedesktop.org
> > platform (at least as I had it) is NOT to provide an ABI for ISVs. In
> > fact that's the LSB's domain.
>
> Yeah, perhaps, but the LSB is not meeting the need here. They've
> specified a few very low level libs, but not enough to build useful
> desktop applications. This isn't going to change anytime soon - they are
> working under far more stringent criteria than is useful for the free
> software community and that makes progress extremely slow.

ABI != desktop tools.

> That's a useful thing to have if the goal is to facilitate sharing
> specific pieces of code between pre-existing platforms, but that's
> somewhat orthogonal to what I'm striving for which is an ability to
> express "I want a block of desktop functionality" in a single
> dependency, instead of 12.

actually, they are the same thing. and it isn't just pre-existing platforms, 
it's also future heretofore unknown platforms which could leverage the common 
base along with older platforms. e.g. what KDE and GNOME lacked when taking 
over for CDE.

> If they are really different things entirely it might be worth adopting
> different terminology, ie calling a unified set of dependencies a base
> rather than a platform (or vice versa).

semantics, and ones that were already set a while ago. the platform is a 
unified set of TECHNOLOGIES (not simply dependencies) that we can work on 
together and leverage together.

please, if i'm getting this wrong, someone else step up and say something. or, 
if i'm getting it largely correct, step up and say something. ;-)

> Obviously you can already get several such platforms (kde, gnome,
> mozilla, java, mono) but for various reasons these platforms usually
> aren't just collections of useful/proven libraries but enforce
> particular code styles, implementation languages etc. I think something
> more liberal would be handy to have around.

we all agree here, it's a matter of scope and at which level in the technology 
stack we are looking to augment/improve/define.

> Some think of it as a collection of useful stuff hosted at
> freedesktop.org, others as an ISV ABI, and still others as
> platform-below-the-platforms. It'd be useful to find out which people
> are most interested in and get exact definitions for what they are.

people are most interested in that which they work on, almost by definition. 
so look at what is and has been worked on at freedesktop.org, look at what 
has been suggested as being part of the "platform" releases, and determine 
where those technologies actually fall, because that is what is being worked 
on.

- -- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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