Will GTK be used in Openmoko?

Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) raster at openmoko.org
Fri May 16 11:28:02 CEST 2008


On Fri, 16 May 2008 11:41:31 +0300 Shachar Shemesh <shachar at shemesh.biz>
babbled:

> I have a problem with a mother that forces ME to love her children. This 
> is not a free software volunteer doing what he wishes, if it's good it 
> gets accepted, if not, then not. This is an engineer getting paid with 
> (hopefully) what is, in the end, our money. I think asking a company 
> that wishes me to be its customer should tolerate me asking it about its 
> engineering decisions.

the problem is then chosing an existing toolkit LOSES us other things another
toolkit gets. if you read my mails before efl is GOOD for custom ui's things
like media centers etc. - gtk is not so good at it. things like wm's, file
managers and other things efl is great at doing and does a lot for you that gtk
does not do and won't do without a lot of work. so yes - you are asking us to
do work. you are asking me to change toolkit and INCREASE my workload in other
areas.

> I'll stress it again. I'm not asking anyone to do development for things 
> I need. I'm asking to choose existing, debugged, stable and free 
> libraries that make that development easier, not only for me, but for 
> many others.

you are. there are always gives and takes no one toolkit does EVERYTHING and
does it all properly and perfectly. they have strengths and weaknesses.

> problem is exactly with the area Carsten has dismissed, which is text 
> input. I do not think it as trivial a part of the phone's functionality 

i did no such thing. i didn't not talk about it at all. i left the topic alone.

> as he seems to, and I therefor think the assumption make his statistics 
> irrelevant. I therefor stand by my original "third of the world" statement.

absolutely not. 

> I see this confusion quite often. I run an open source based company[1], 
> and I am a board member of an open source promoting non-profit. If I sit 
> at home and write an open source project[2], no one has the right to 
> complain. Then again, if it is my company that is sponsoring my time for 
> the project[3], for example because it is part of a larger product[4], 
> then I need to make the distinction between those who just use the free 
> part and those who are customers. Still, if I choose the wrong 
> technology, people will point it out to me. I think that there is a 
> chance that Carsten is making a bad choice here, for some definition of 
> bad. His answer did not go any distance toward making me think 
> otherwise. In fact, the more I read the more I get the feeling that the 
> ONLY thing going for EFL is that Carsten loves it like a mother.

you may have any opinion you like. 

> Again, if he was a standalone developer, I would have no leg to stand 
> on. In this case, however, it is the money I intend to put into buying 
> the machine that pays his rent. This is not the FOSS model. If you read 
> his reasoning, statistics and average salaries claim, you will see that 
> very plainly.
> 
> That is why I mentioned that the phone is free. We are used to such 
> logic from proprietary companies.

if you read the thread - gtk is still shipped. the apps are almost all qt. it
compares more than favorably to MOST PHONES. i walk into a store here and guess
how many phones will even DISPLAY arabic - letalone have input for them? shall
i go on about japan - or korea, or taiwan, or china? your view is of YOUR
world. that is a fair view. i was trying to let you know that though it is
unfair - YOUR world is fairly small in the scheme of things. we make make
decisions with DIFFERENT priorities. i was trying to explain that the demand
for bidi stuff has been close to non-existent in the past 12 years or so i've
done open source programming. i've been asked about it twice - ever, and once
someone offered to do it - then vanished. to me that indicates just how little
interest there is. and no follow-through from the only offer of help that
appeared.

EFL offers things that gtk does not. so we lose bidi and instead gain something
else. the something else is more valuable than bidi - to us as bidi customers
are a tiny portion of the userbase. did i say that you should now wrote your
apps with it? that it is the only thing shipping on the phone? that you cannot
use any other toolkits? that all apps use it. certain specific apps do.

i grew up in australia - arse end of the world. its a small place out of thee
way and frankly the world doesn't care what happens there. it doesn't have
nukes. doesn't have a huge population. is not insanely rich. it's a minority
corner of the world and the world will mostly ignore it. the world is though,
absolutely right in doing so. most australians get upset at being ignored and
at the "arse end of the world" in terms of world affairs, but that's life. it's
a harsh world out there. because to the world - australia matters so little
that it's not worth much effort. it's a rationalised response.

like anything else you focus on what is MOST important. i was trying to explain
WHY we make decisions that are not what you like. there is reasoning behind
them. when bidi (input and display) becomes important - it will be addressed.
in the meantime other things have been addressed. all of efl is utf-8
internally. ALL it needs is the display and then xinput handling. if i chose to
work on something i'd do chinese, japanese and korean long before i looked at
arabic/farsi/hebrew. for those asian languages display is already done. XIM
needs some work. for display of everything using pango would help. so you are
espousing we choose widget sets based on lack of support of things known and
known how to be fixed just lacking a priority status? i don't think that's
wise, but then again i happen to know the internals and where to start in
fixing it - so i see it as not so big a problem as such, just some hard work.

in thinking gtk vs efl is a simple choice you show you need to do some research
on EFL. it is not. it is a very different beast that does a lot of other things
gtk doesn't come close it. gtk is much better at "normal widgets". its intl
input and display support will be better. 

-- 
Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) <raster at openmoko.org>




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