So, Jeffrey and Ross showed their best sides in a funny misunderstanding, but Jeffrey had some good questions either way. Distributions will do their thing anyway, leacing the question: do the default applications really matter?
- GNOME has no photo-acquiring applications.
- With GNOME’s no-patent clause, can we really argue that we support DVD playback in Totem?
- We have a dozen of audio-CD players, and the only thing we all agree on is that the one considered default has to die. :-).
It probably doesn’t matter. Fedora will turn off the DVD support button either way, and regardless of the default photo app, either Novell will change it to F-spot or Fedora will change it to some non-mono app. So what honour is left for GNOME here? I think the very least we can do is promote our desktop for the few that do use our desktop with defaults (Debian? Gentoo? Arch? Probably some more… Also, let’s not forget jhbuild).
That means to promote one of the CD players that we like (Ross mentioned Sound Juicer and Totem; I’d default to Sound-Juicer since some users will want to rip rather than play, and Sound Juicer allows both), and well, if we think we can validly claim that we support DVD playback, even with all patents involved, we should default to Totem for that, too.
In the end, g-v-m isn’t all that large really, but for those happy few that use our defaults, it is very user-visible. We shouldn’t take it too lightly.