Yet another monthly platform email

[Chris Lee]

Carl Worth wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 14:36:19 -0500, Adam Jackson wrote:
> 
> > The impression I got at xdevconf was that smaller is better.  The impression I 
> > get from the archives is that the platform should define those pieces which 
> > are baked and stable.
> 
> Personally, I agree with both of those.

As do I.

> >                       However, I also got from xdc that the package set 
> > under consideration for the platform is: fontconfig, gstreamer, dbus, hal, 
> > cairo, maybe pkgconfig.
> 
> The context in which I remember hearing cairo and the platform
> mentioned together at cairo was along the lines of "Of the software at
> freedesktop.org, what kinds of things do we expect to be baked and
> stable at some point", and definitely not that it's there now. I
> believe dbus was mentioned as being in a similar class.

DBUS is definitely in a similar situation. GStreamer and HAL are also
not stable enough that I'd feel comfortable including them in the
platform. The GStreamer guys have been kicking major ass and they're
working on 1.0 now, but they haven't committed to their current stable
release for the kind of ABI (or, for that matter, even API) stability
that we're going to need to offer to projects like KDE and GNOME.

> > Cairo worries me. [...] To me this doesn't sound like baked software.
> 
> Don't worry. It's not baked.
> 
> If someone is crazy enough to think cairo belongs in a platform as
> stable software, right now, then I'll just go break some more APIs
> just to prove them wrong.
> 
> We are working towards stability though. And when we get to 1.0, I
> plan to be committing to live with that API for quite some time.

::grin::

I'd be willing to suggest that for the first release of the platform, we
don't even include any software at all and just go with the
standards/specs that everyone's using.

For inclusion, specs I'd suggest:
desktop-file
basedir
menu
mime

Specs I'd specifically exclude:
recent-file
XDND
XDS
XSETTINGS

The recent-file spec is undergoing a rewrite at the moment; although the
current revision has seen some fairly heavy use in GNOME and
OpenOffice.org, I'd say that it's worth waiting for the new version
before we go and include it in our platform. Same goes for XDND, which
was, last time I checked, under discussion for an update.

XDS is only used in the Rox file manager and XSETTINGS is only currently
being used in GTK. Until these start seeing more widespread adoption,
I'd feel really uncomfortable including them in the platform.

The one I'm on the fence about is the systray spec. Right now, pretty
much everybody supports it on at least some level, but there's a lot of
discussion about a major update to it in the somewhat near future, so
I'm not sure that it'd be a good idea to include it in the platform.

-clee