Summary of the fdo disussion at GCDS

[Simon McVittie]

On Wed, 08 Jul 2009 at 22:00:09 +0200, Olivier Goffart wrote:
> We agreed that freedesktop would have a wiki page listing the 
> specification/implementations and saying whether they are blessed by each 
> desktop, and the implementation status.
> 
> It is not allowed to take namespace on org.freedesktop unless the project get 
> blessed by at least GNOME and KDE.

I think freedesktop.org hosts two types of project, and it's not necessarily
useful to conflate how they are treated. (I use "project" quite loosely here -
specification, implementation, whatever.)

On one hand, there are projects that identify themselves solely as
"freedesktop" or "XDG" standards, like XDG_DATA_DIRS,
org.freedesktop.Notifications and the still-hypothetical
org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver. These only have value if they're agreed on
in a cross-desktop way, so being strict about acceptance seems entirely
appropriate.

On the other hand, there are projects that have their own identity, and could
reasonably continue even if one desktop rejects them - for instance, Telepathy,
GStreamer, Cairo, Nepomuk, Galago and even D-Bus could all be useful projects
even if not everyone accepts them, and they all have a non-generic "brand name"
of their own (which gives them a namespace).

Requiring cross-desktop agreement for an org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver interface
is all very well, but I think if we'd needed "buy-in" from all major desktops
in order to even start Telepathy, we wouldn't necessarily have got started.
Designing a relatively complex specification like Telepathy "up front" doesn't
really work - we've often had to revise bits of the specification based on
implementation experience - and it took a lot of time, both in specification
and implementation work, to get Telepathy to the point where it's actually
useful to GNOME or KDE.

Or, is the idea that Telepathy should have "incubated" in some other
namespace - in practice, that probably means either a "forge" like sf.net,
a domain name owned by an involved company like Nokia or Collabora, or a
domain name owned by an interested project like GNOME - and moved to
freedesktop.org only when it was good enough to get GNOME and KDE approval?

(In practice that would mean either that we broke API completely during that
move, or kept the "legacy" namespace indefinitely; and I'm glad we're not
com.nokia.Telepathy, or uk.co.collabora.Telepathy, or org.gnome.Telepathy.)

I think org.freedesktop.Galago.Notifications would have been a much better
name for notification-daemon's API; I'd be interested to see Aaron's opinion
on that.

Regards,
    Simon