freedesktop.org specification process

[Rodney Dawes]

I generally disagree with the idea that in order to use the
org.freedesktop namespace for DBus interfaces, you must first gain
acceptance through having multiple desktops use your interface.

This means that it will be much harder to gain acceptance (as I'm sure
that lots of KDE developers are reluctant to use org.gnome services, and
vice-versa, without there being acceptance). It also means that once
that acceptance is gained, you either don't use the new namespace, or
you are immediately required to break API compatibility. And I think
encouraging the breaking of compatibility for this is probably one of
the last things we want to do. This would be very painful for
distributions and developers to deal with.

Shouldn't we rather be encouraging people to use that namespace, and
get their interfaces accepted as standards on FreeDesktop, rather than
telling them to break API when/if they do get accepted here?


On Thu, 2009-07-09 at 22:19 +0200, Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
> Following up on the discussion about freedesktop.org at GCDS and the 
> additional input on the mailing list, I wrote down a specification for the 
> process how to manage freedesktop.org specifications. It's based on the 
> consensus we built at GCDS plus the input which came from Aaron and others 
> before and after the meetings.
> 
> To bootstrap the process I wrote it down as a freedesktop.org specification 
> following the proposed process. You can find the text at 
> http://gitorious.org/~cornelius/xdg-specs/xdg-specs-spec0/blobs/master/specifications/SpecificationProcess/specification.txt
> 
> Please have a look and comment.
> 
> The next step would be to work in your comments, and when this is done to 
> merge it back to the main repository and get approval by the release teams.
>