Fwd: Mono (Re: New Programs for Hardy?)

[Martin Owens]

> F-Spot and gThumb are very similar in capabilities on local images.
> Though F-Spot's interface is a little cleaner.  But the big difference
> comes in Web2.0 integration.  GThumb has none, while F-Spot integrates
> with Flickr, Picasa, etc.  Hands down, this is what end users expect,
> and it is gThumbs that needs to be eliminated.

Users who want any of these applications can get them from the
repositories; just because you like the applications doesn't make them
good for inclusion by default. The argument seems to be that we should
sacrifice 60MB of CD space for a handful of extra features. The space
instead could be used to have many more user friendly features than
just nice sticky notes and Flicker intergration.

Although I didn't see you mentioning that F-Spots flicker integration
will be removed and moved into Conduit (which we don't include by
default) so you argument does loose some merit with the way things are
going.

> As for Tomboy vs GNOME sticky notes, this one is even more obvious.
> Sticky notes needs to go away.  GNOME no longer considers it part of the
> base suite of packages, and has instead worked with Tomboy on tighter
> and tighter integration.  Tomboy can fire links to open on your  browser
> or Nautulus, fire alarms as reminders, and integrates with Evolution.
> Sticky notes does none of that.

Notes are not a core application, I haven't the faintest idea why we
include any notes app at all. Some people may find them useful but
they can quite easily install this extra application.

> I realize the original argument was about the size of Mono.  And that is
> a legitimate argument.  But lets also realize functionality and
> integration needs to be maximized in order to make this distro easy for
> the noobs it is aimed at.  We already have a distro out there that makes
> sacrifices of number of packages over space... its called DSL.

I think some of these arguments are a little biased; I feel like some
of the developers are championing Mono as a principle rather than on
technical merits. It's nice that they've invested all this time into
learning CLI; But we shouldn't let our ego's run away with us. Mono is
big, too big in fact to be reasonably included by default without
being biased.

I'll be happy to see a small light weight notes and photo application
for inclusion. But at the moment these don't exist and we shouldn't be
looking for these tiny features when we could be including much better
things on the CD.

Regards, Martin Owens