Re: nmf packages

On Thu, 15 Aug 2002 07:13:57 -0700 (PDT)
<Jim.Gettys_at_hp.com> wrote:
[...]
> So we can definately manage the footprint of GTK2, without question:
> the only questions are how much work it is to get the space, and
> exactly how much space it is.

Look, I believe you and Phil without a doubt that it can be done, yes.
But on the other hand look behind you and see which amount of work can
be done in a certain amount of time and which type of work this is. And
you will see that the huge amount of work that is required to shrink X,
Xlib, GTK and so on wihch requires very special knowledge will not be
done within the next 1/2 year; not even within the next full year.

I don't want to spread pessimism here. I just try to be realistic.

I started GPE because there was nothing like it.
And there was nothing because we actually had something like a deadlock
situation. Everyone was waiting for someone else to start: The app
developers for the toolkit folks to come up with a nice toolkit, the
toolkit folks for the app developers to show the need, and so on.

GPE was about exactly that: Start now, do it with what we have _now_,
keep it simple and come up with a solution quite quickly.

Discussing possibilities of tomorrow does not give you any working
environment now. That's the problem I see in switching too early. We
would end up where we have been before GPE, just "toying" around,
someone doing this using that and the other one using something
different for basically the same thing.

What I want to say is this type of development has two faces: One
research and one for every day use.

If Linux on PDAs shall be taken seriously by the world we cannot only
provide something for the researchers! We also have to provide something
for those of us who want to use their PDA as PDA in everyday life.
Reserach is for tomorrow, life is now.

We have come very close to a working release of GPE.
I refuse to stop GTK1.2 development now in favour of _waiting_ for GTK2
and friends. The only solution I see is to fork.
One stable GTK1.2 based tree that will become a release and a GTK2 based
new tree for development for tomorrow. But like any fork this has the
disadvantage that we will also split efforts with this, i.e. there will
be less time spent on the stable tree...

> - Jim
CU
  nils faerber

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