Now that 0.17 is (almost) out

[Miroslav Silovic <silovic at zesoi dot fer dot hr>]

I mailed Quartic about his GNOME roadmap document. One suggestion was
to create a generic language binding for GNOME. The idea was to use
.defs files in gnome-guile (or a suitable, more general replacement)
as a basis for language binding creation for GNOME. Rationale is that
while binding any given gtk or gnome library function is close to
trivial, the size of API itself is a major obstacle (GNOME API is not
just gtk/gdk/libgnome/libgnomeui, it's also libxml, libgtop, libghttp,
gdome, gnome-print, and ORBit itself). Using just CORBA for this isn't
good idea because gnome libs by design don't follow the CORBA->C
binding.

Here's part of his reply, for the reference (I made a few CORBA
suggestions, snipped out):

> I'm not sure what to do about language bindings.  It was discussed a
> bit on the list some days ago; the gnome.defs thingy is not entirely
> bad, although it certainly does not cover everything we want to do.  I
> wonder if you and Marius could discuss this, maybe in conjunction with
> the Python/Gtk guys.

So... I agree that gnome-python folks should be contacted, as well as
people who wrote bindings to other languages (objc and TOM pop to
mind). Perhaps a common mailing list would be a good start, as well.
I think that a common language binding base is *extremely* important
for GNOME (as language neutrality is its major feature, and because
GNOME is the only major library suite in existance that actually gave
any thought to true multilanguage support). It would also allow us to
share effort with other teams (thereby allowing, for instance, objc
folks to tackle libxml, while we finish libgnome binding - both of
which would (hopefully) be reusable from, say, Ada).

What do you all think?

-- 
How to eff the ineffable?