Re: suggestions for Guile wrt GTK and Gnome support

[Neil W. Van Dyke]

Ariel Rios <address@hidden> writes at 00:13 24-Jul-2001 -0400:
> > Ximian, which effectively controls the direction of Gnome, will now be
> > preoccupied with cloning Microsoft architecture and collaborating with
> > Microsoft.  They'll presumably be unable to move Gnome development in
> > ways that are conducive to its use with Guile (not to mention that there
> > is now arguably business disincentive to actively aid the success of
> > Guile).
> This statement is not fair with Ximian. And it also states wrongly
> that Ximian leads GNOME. That's no true. 

I'd actually rather not argue this point.  I mentioned it not as a
criticism, but as leading fact that I thought was already evident to
everyone who stopped to consider it.  But people are of course free to
disagree with the assertion and disregard any argument predicated on it.

> Also guile-gtk and gnome-guile is stable, works well and is kept up to
> date with Guile.

Great!  I'm glad to hear that!

I'd like to suggest that those packages be made more accessible to
people by putting them in a centralized place with Guile and being sure
they continue to work with the latest version.

I've often not been able to build those packages when I tried, and it
hits the frustration threshold where people decide to use Java or C
rather than try to get an unknown quantity to work.  Another Guile
recently reported a similar problem.

When I looked for latest versions of various people's GTK support
libraries for Guile a week or two ago, I ended up having to do a
brute-force search with Google.  Among other pages, I found your
personal Web pages, where there was a link to a gnome-guile home page of
yours that presumably once existed, but it no longer exists.  The
download directory was not indexed, so I had to Google through mail list
archives for URLs to specific versions that were available for download.

All the little headaches are barriers to Guile adoption because they
occur for Guile newbies during a crucial phase, as the newbie is excited
about trying Guile and willing to get wrapped up in flow activity as
Guile leads him/her with a series of immediate gratification rewards --
only the newbie instead ends up with days of disconcerting hassle before
they can actually hack on their own little pilot project.  The first
time people have to go looking for something, or it doesn't build for
them, you lose people.  I'm guessing that more often than not, people
who were open to becoming Guile application hackers get the
not-entirely-fair-but-understandable impression that Guile is not ready
for prime-time.

> > Unfortunately, I don't yet have the GTK familiarity to do this myself,
> > (and don't have the time in the near future), so I'm hoping someone else
> > would be excited about doing this.
> This is already done. 
> 
> Can someone explain to me, why I only receive flames about gnome-guile /
> guile-gtk?

My original message wasn't intended as a flame, certainly not of you or
your work, and I'm sorry if it came out that way.

If you are a developer of working GTK and Gnome libraries for Guile,
then your work really deserves more prominent exposure than I think it's
getting right now.  I think that centralizing them with Guile and making
it really easy and glaringly obvious what people need to do to get the
best GTK support with the latest Guile will help.

-- 
                                          Neil W. Van Dyke <address@hidden>
                                          http://www.neilvandyke.org/