First, I am not a coder: >>I'd argue that except for gconf and MAYBE gnome-canvas none of this >>stuff belongs in GNOME at all; these are all very generic facilities >>that shouldn't depend on any of the IPC, desktop, etc. stuff. >>Otherwise we wind up with the same kind of confusion and versioning >>problems that Windows has suffered with for so long. >THis is one of my big annoyances with GNOME currently: there's a lot >of useful libraries that really have nothing to do with GNOME but >which are not separately exported, forcing you to install all the junk >you don't want to get the stuff you do. I think, from user point of view, and after reading a lot of mails (here and other lists), that the desktop projects could separate lot of things into libs, like the libs for images that currently exist, or libc. IIRC GLib is a step in this direction, was inside GTK or GNOME, now is a separate lib, and GTK too, was Gimp toolkit, now used in lot of places (correct me if I am wrong). If somebody is reading this, maybe the desktop coders could accept that their projects are becoming stupidly fat and should "atomize" (?) so others can reutilize code without bloating. Desktop should take the same approach than image apps, using libpng, libtiff, libungif, etc, and if a new format appears, a new lib is created, not made part of the image app. gnome-print? libprint! If a desktop needs things to use a lib, make an adapter, not a new lib (gnome-print uses libprint, and any other app can use libprint directly too, or via gnome-print). Well, now everyone code whatever they want. These are just ideas. :] Another idea, get a water pistol or a foam hammer and organize desktop / editor / unix family (BSD vs SV) wars. Everybody should participate, maybe that way everybody will realize that you can live with the rest. ;] GSR
