hey, remember the platform?

[Chris Lee]

Adam Jackson wrote:
> On Thursday 30 June 2005 11:57, Wichmann, Mats D wrote:
> 
>>> and cairo isn't being used in KDE, so it's
>>>right out of any list of de-facto adopted code.
>>
>>Just curious what would change your view of this (not
>>questioning it, it still seems too early to me as well).
>>Is "in KDE" always a requirement?  I'm hearing a lot of
>>pretty key apps starting to use cairo, including
>>OpenOffice and Firefox - it's not mainstream for either
>>AFAIK.  Does something like that end up tipping the
>>balance?
> 
> 
> I think not being adopted by a toolkit with roughly 50% deployment as the 
> system's primary toolkit, is a pretty clear indicator that cairo does not 
> belong to the set of software required for building a modern desktop.
> 
> That's is not an indictment of cairo, or of qt.  Read that as a statement of 
> the intent of the platform.

We're not putting things in the platform in order to evangelize them.
We're simply collecting things in the platform that are *already* used
by the majority of the desktop projects - Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, KDE,
GNOME, etc - and saying "These projects work well with this collection
of software, and these versions of the projects comprise version X.Y of
the fd.o Platform."

The platform is not for pushing software on *any* project. We're not
going to take Arthur (Qt4's new paint engine) and drop that into the
platform, because it'd be stupid to put something that's not in use by
GNOME into the platform.

(And fwiw, I think Cairo has lots of promise, especially once their API
is stable. I have no doubt that once they hit that target, somebody will
get an itch to write an Arthur backend for Cairo, thus satisfying our
"In use by the majority" requirement and making it a perfect candidate
for addition to the platform.)