Will GTK be used in Openmoko?

[Karsten Ensinger]

Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote:
>> On Thu, 15 May 2008 20:58:48 +0300 Shachar Shemesh <shachar at shemesh.biz>
>> babbled:
 >> [...]
>> as such EFL has no right-to-left support - why? no one has yet to step 
>> up and help. why? there is so little demand for it
> in the developer community. Then again, the NEO is not intended to stay 
> within the developer community.
[...]
>>  - i don't mean to be, but minority languages tend to get the
>> worse end of the stick support-wise
> Which is precisely why I'm asking that we stick to toolkits that are 
> mature enough not to discard them.

> Essentially you are saying: We (actually, you|) decided to go with EFL, 
> it doesn't do non-western, tough on everybody else. That MIGHT have made 
> sense if no toolkit supported those languages, but the simple truth is 
> that other toolkits exist, and they do support it.
> What I'm saying is: Take the question of non-western support into 
> consideration when thinking whether to go EFL.

> In other words, instead of telling all those billions (literally) of 
> people "your language is too weird for my mind, so I'm going to 
> disregard you when choosing a technology", I'm suggesting we tell EFL 
> "your toolkit does not support the first choice language for a third of 
> the world, so we will not pick you".
>>  :( i know how painful it can be supporting
>> them - i looked into doing right-to-left and gave up when i saw the 
>> world of hurt that was doing mixes right-to-left and left-to-right
 >> formatting...
> No, that part is easy. It's easy because it's a solved problem. The 
> parts that are hard are text input and getting program to respect 
> paragraph direction. It's a lot of work even if the infrastructure is 
> there.
[...]
> Shachar

Sorry if I sound harsh, but I want to make a point.

What part of "free" you have not understand?

YOU are free to do whatever you want regarding using toolkits within
Openmoko. There WILL GTK as well as QT shipping too.
And do not blame a mother for loving her children. ;-)

NO ONE promised that Openmoko will deliver a ready to use phone
developed ENTIRELY ON THEIR OWN. They always stated that they need the
help of the community to get "user-ready".

DO NOT BLAME them for not supporting your preferred language/writing
style from the very first, but get your hands on the keyboard and write
the missing parts yourself.
YOU YOURSELF stated, that this is an easy part, so you have to be an
experienced developer. Then DO IT. If you can't do it yourself, because
it is still not that easy, find someone else to do it for you. If no
one wants to do it without getting paid, give him the money to do it.

That is the way, open source development works. One has some needs and
does it himself or finds someone to do it for him. It is not about
blaming others for not taking his personal needs into account (even if
there are millions of others having the same needs).

You are free to do whatever you want to do and we ("we" means: not you
but all the others) are free to do NOT whatever we do not want to do.

It is that nice and new thing with Openmoko, that they never promised
the All-in-one-everyone-will-be-happy-out-of-the-box product. They
will provide the starting grid and the community will do the racing.
Take on your helmet and start racing, dude. ;-)

Regards