D-Conf
by havoc
Aaron,
I don’t really get your post on some level. I feel I’m missing
something. The whole argument I’ve been repeatedly making on xdg list
is that GNOME will not adopt a “D-Conf” unless it’s actually
better than GConf, and of course Waldo says the
same with respect to KConfig.
For the record, I don’t think the current round of D-Conf discussion
will go anywhere, because a number of the people involved are known to
be more about sending mail than writing software, and some other
people involved seem very reluctant to listen to the GConf/KConfig
experiences enough to genuinely improve on the existing systems. This
means that the remaining people who might do something useful are
probably confused or drowned out.
If people go off and write something called D-Conf that doesn’t take
into account the KConfig and GConf lessons, then we won’t use
it. Pretty simple. If they want to try to get it right though, then
let them. What’s to be afraid of?
For my part, I’m just documenting
here
the “lessons of GConf” in the hope that sooner or later someone will
use this information wisely.
BTW, Aaron you say:
there are two good kinds of standards: ones that
document successes that already exist and were, really, already
“standard” before being canonized as such, and ones that are such
great technologies that people run to adopt them.
I agree wholeheartedly and that is how freedesktop.org should work
(and how it has worked in successful cases such as fontconfig and
Cairo and EWMH). Anybody can host their experimental project on
freedesktop.org, and discuss their own crazy ideas on the mailing
lists, but there is no standards committee. The purpose of
freedesktop.org is to allow people to see what’s already de facto, and
give people a place to try to develop great technologies with input
from the desktop projects. Some (most?) of the attempts will fail
and that’s fine.
At least, that’s my view of things. Other people are free to think
whatever they want. I’m not paranoid about it because the major
desktop projects pretty obviously have a veto on any proposed “common”
system or standard in any area, so what people think doesn’t really
matter, only what the core desktop developers think will make a
difference.
I guess the main conclusion is, don’t confuse “people who post to a
mailing list” with “the actual developers” – surely anyone who’s
worked on an open source project understands this…
(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2005-04.html#10.2)