19/April/2004

GNOME Development Platform

All the comments from the Mono/Java discussion recently have made a lot of people
be paranoid about the future of GNOME (I’m not naming those people, sorry :-).
I’ve heard in the last few weeks a lot of complaints, not about the decision,
which hasnt been made yet and wont for a while I guess, but about the conversation
taking place. And one of those complaints I’ve heard is that “GNOME
does not need a new development platform
“.

I am myself not sure what is the best way yet, but of course I am not blind enough
to not see that we really need a better development platform, maybe not for the
most experienced hackers, but for new developers. People missing this fundamental
point are missing the whole point of the conversation, and probably have never dealt
with libtool, autoconf, automake, etc. Be it Java, Mono, C/Python,
a custom thing or the the
new D programming language
, it’s clear we need a better development
platform to attract new developers. If someone still doesnt believe so, please come
see me, I’ve got a few bugs to fix that involve using our hyper-advanced-dont-need-changes
super platform.

GNOME-DB

Spent some time this weekend going over some patches and bug reports for libgda
and libgnomedb, and ended up doing the 1.0.4
release
, which should have been out much sooner (it’s been 3 months since
1.0.3).

Also, on the reporting front, seems some stuff might come out from the merging of Papyrus and the libgda report
API/engine. I hope at last this is, once for all, the definitive step to have the reporting
stuff working in libgda/libgnomedb.