[7] in Athena User Interface
Re: Athena User Interface Project seeks advice
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Havoc Pennington)
Sat Apr 29 11:38:14 2000
To: Richard Tibbetts <tibbetts@MIT.EDU>
Cc: gnome-devel-list@gnome.org, aui@MIT.EDU
From: Havoc Pennington <hp@redhat.com>
Date: 29 Apr 2000 11:38:51 -0400
In-Reply-To: Richard Tibbetts's message of "Sat, 29 Apr 2000 11:24:53 -0400"
Message-Id: <y5w3do4hq7o.fsf@icon.labs.redhat.com>
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Richard Tibbetts <tibbetts@MIT.EDU> writes:
> My current project is to construct the development platform on which
> we will be building the system. This seems to mean a decision between
> the GNOME-1.0 platform and the GNOME-2.0 platform. Most of the work
> will be occurring over the summer, before GNOME-2.0 goes to release.
You should never use unreleased stuff, unless you are into pain. The
GNOME 1.0 platform will continue to work long after 2.0 is released;
you can install the two platforms simultaneously.
> 1) What will the changes be between 1.0 and 2.0? If we modify the
> panel, or the file-manager, or other things, how much will we
> lose?
If you hack the apps without sending the patches upstream, you will
lose quite a bit; there's no guarantee of code stability there
whatsoever. (Apps are not in the development platform.)
I would suggest that you make the apps configurable so you can modify
them as you wish using a config file, and then you get that patch
upstream. You don't want to maintain patched versions of the apps.
(If you do require patches, I would recommend that you create custom
RPMs and maintain patches in the SRPM, which is fairly manageable;
this is what we do at Red Hat.)
> If we build apps on 1.0, how much will we need to change
> them to work with 2.0, and how many convenience API's will we be
> missing out on?
>
The upgrade from 1.0 to 2.0 will be trivial, because backward
compatibility will be maintained except for a few things that are easy
to fix.
You'll be missing out on:
- many GTK enhancements, see the TODO on developer.gnome.org/status
(if you notice a nasty bit in GTK 1.2, it's probably fixed)
- GConf
- gnome-vfs
- Bonobo
- GtkHTML
> 2) How unstable will GNOME-2.0 be through the summer? Will maintaining
> a GNOME-2.0 system be unduly painful? Will the API's be changing,
> or will we just be dealing with buggy code?
>
Very/Yes/Yes.
I would recommend that you use the released stuff that comes with most
Linux distributions right now. This would be GTK 1.2, gnome-libs 1.0,
etc. I would then consider porting to the 2.0 platform when it comes out.
Also at the end of the summer a bunch of components (such as GConf)
will get added to the 1.0 platform, and you can use them then.
Havoc
