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GNOME and secondary frameworks (Mono in this case)
Currently, one of the most important decisions of the GNOME project is being taken. We have been discussing whether we should approve Mono as an acceptable dependency.
The discussion has made me think about how GNOME was in 1998, when I began to get involved, and how it is now. The aim of the project is still meant to be the same, but the community interactions are quite different.
For me, the most important change, besides all the technical issues that the project faced in these eight years, is that now there are many different interests involved, and by that I mean the interests of IT companies.
I'd like to speculate what would have happened a few years ago if someone were to propose mixing a second higher level platform with GNOME's C + GObject infrastructure. I bet he would have been thrown to the lions! In fact, to be based on C + GObject (GtkObject at that time) was meant to be one of the project's advantages over KDE.
However, even if there are many technical, legal and political issues, there are still people pushing for Mono to become an additional framework for GNOME.
Wasn't the GNOME desktop supposed to be based on the GNOME framework? Why do they want to use the .NET framework plus the GTK toolkit to build the GNOME desktop? Does it make any sense at all?
Let's forget about the fact of that not even Microsoft is using .NET for their desktop, and let's focus on my previous question. Why do we need two frameworks for a single desktop? Does it provide anything other than the need to call g_object_unref()?
I do hope the GNOME project will make the right decision about additional frameworks. I don't care if it is Mono, Python or Java. IMHO, none of them should be accepted as a dependency.
Sometimes, when I begin to argue about this messy issue, I get so disappointed that I start thinking: "Alvaro, face it, you ought to refresh your C++ and learn to use the KDE framework". :-/ And, I may not be that wrong. Look at it this way: one framework, one desktop, many innovative applications and the absence of these kinds of political debates. Sounds nice, doesn't it?
So, please.. let's make the right decision. I don't fancy C++.
