Summary of the fdo disussion at GCDS

[Jannis Pohlmann]

Hey,

On Wed, 8 Jul 2009 22:00:09 +0200
Olivier Goffart <ogoffart at kde.org> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> We had a small discussion involving few KDE, Gnome, and freedesktop
> fellow at Gran Canaria desktop summit.
> 
> I'm trying there to summarize, correct me if I'm wrong.
> 
> 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.
> 
> In order to get blessed, it has to be accepted by the 'release
> manager' of the desktop.

First of all, I completely agree with Aaron in that we should get the
people involved in decisions who really *care* about the topic. That's
not the release manager(s) but it's the people who actually implement
the specifications and the people who are working in certain areas
(like icons or audio stuff).

That somehow reminds me of a recently approved German law in which the
data protection commissioner is responsible for having an eye on a
committee dealing with blocking child pornography sites - this has
nothing to do with his job. As bad as this comparison might be, the
same holds for release teams and fd.o specifications. It has *nothing*
to do with releases, so it shouldn't be put on the release teams. 


The second point I'd like to make is that I'm not sure that a 'blessing'
or 'acceptance' of GNOME and KDE is a good enough base for deciding
whether something is accepted as an fd.o spec or not. What really
matters is whether a spec is being implemented by several projects or
not.

After giving it some thought I'm much in favor of Aarons
repository-based approach which combines meta information (who
implements what and if so, to what degree) with the actual specs.

The main problem I still see with this approach is that it doesn't
really answer the question when to grant a specification the fd.o
status (as in: under which conditions). This is only really relevant
for specs that require namespaces (e.g. the icon naming spec doesn't,
but specs based on D-Bus interfaces do, specs involving XML formats do,
and the same goes for libraries with fdo or xdg in their name).
Answering this question is really important.

I personally disagree with accepting a spec only if is implemented by
both, GNOME and KDE. If a spec is implemented by KDE, Xfce and
Enlightenment and maybe several other applications/environments, is that
under no circumstances relevant and worth considering as an fd.o spec?

  - Jannis
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