Portland

August 9, 2006 10:01 pm General

So finally decided to join the Portland mailing list today, with gentle prodding by Joe. For a long time I’ve agreed in principle with what Portland project is trying to achieve, though wildly disappointed with the implementation (I still am). Which is why I was delighted to read Waldo’s mail announcing the DTL Technical Workgroup conference call. From my point of view, the specs are definitely where we should be spending all our availalbe time right now – they’re often hard to read, ambigious, and have a weird mix of specification and implementation. They also suffer from the fact that it’s not entirely clear what commitment there is for the various interfaces they export.

What is worrying is the intense desire to have something out yesterday (akin to what’s happening in the LSB too), with the current approach of using a bunch of scripts seeming like a train crash waiting to happen – if you don’t believe me, ask one of the guys who’ve sat for years on a Sun ARC committee on how easy it is to maintain compatibility with them. In my previous experience in Sun, the desktop team have taken 5+ years to slowly mature the various set of GNOME interfaces – even now, there’s only a relatively small set that we’re actually committed to. Does that hurt our ISVs? Perhaps, though I think constantly changing them will hurt them more.

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