followup regarding desktop specifications

[George Kraft]

>>/ How often does freedesktop.org specification team conference call,  how 
/>>/ often does the group meet?
/
>There is no team. People make proposals, they are discussed, if they are
>good they are implemented in the desktop.

That promotes extreme programming; however, it does not foster the development of a standards specification.
When does one lock down the descriptions of the APIs and structures?  When can one produce an ABI from a stable 
library?  When can one write a conformance test suite from the specification, then validate the libraries?

Think of a standards specification as a legal contract between and software application and shared
services (ie., libgtk, libglib).  One has to be overly detailed.   For example, how can I get distros
A and B to reliably provide libfoo.so for my application?  What if distro A patches or updates libfoo which
breaks my application?  Who is right and who is wrong with respect to the stability of my application?

[The answer is the distro providing libfoo.so as specified by freedesktop.org, not the head of the CVS
branch. ;-)  This discussion then leads you to library and symbol versioning, and the specification
defining the least common denominator of the libraries in use.]

George (gk4)