getting started

[Mike Hearn]

George Kraft wrote:
> The three key ingredients for a successful standardization and
> certification are:

Does it make sense to be certified? Wouldn't this just slow us down? 
What's the benefit to the typical desktop Linux developer today (ie open 
source guy or small commercial enterprise). Windows isn't a certified 
standard,  does that hold it back?

They aren't rhetorical questions, I really don't know the answer. I'm 
not sure what certification gets us apart from making very large, 
conservative companies happier.

> 	1) detailed written specification

Hmm, does the documentation count here? Bear in mind GTK+ is not fully 
documented (yet).

> 	2) a widely adopted implementation

Well, we'd be standardising de-facto standard implementations. I'm not 
convinced it's possibly or sensible to specify the behaviour of a widget 
toolkit exactly enough that you can do a clean-room reimplementation 
from it and have it just drop in. That's a huge amount of effort, maybe 
not even possible at all.

> 	3) conformance test suites

How do you test a widget toolkit? GTK has thousands of entry points, and 
AFAIK there isn't any formal test suite currently apart from gtk-demo 
and a few test programs in the tree.

In the Wine project we do things like test callback ordering, 
getting/setting properties and so on, but it's hardly comprehensive.

thanks -mike