Raphael Bauduin
writes:
[ Raph Levien has responded to Raphael Bauduin in a talkback
below. lt-ed. ]
Last month, Raph Levien posted an
open letter about the future of ghostscipt. In this letter, he
expresses the fact that he would like to see it linked against GTK+
and GNOME.
Though he emphasizes he doesn’t want to exclude other desktop
environment, I’m wondering if it is a good idea to link such
general software against non-general non-ubiquitous libraries like
GTK+ and GNOME libraries. I am not a advanced programmer, so I
won’t argue that what I say is the truth. However, I think this is
an issue that needs to be discussed and debated more than it has
been until now. Ghostscript is a piece of software used in a lot of
programs, lots of them being non GTK/GNOME software. If I want to
use ghostscipt from the command line, would it mean I would have to
install the GTK/GNOME libraries? What about KDE software
extensively using Ghostscript? Talking with other people, I was
suggested that it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing to link
ghostscript to a toolkit, but that it could be clever to, for
example, consider XUL that already has a GTK binding, and that
could have a QT binding in a near future. It wouldn’t be linked to
Gnome libraries in this case, but that’s what I’m advocating anyway
😉 It seems Raph wants ghostscript to be linked to GNOME even
under KDE, making it appear as a KDE app. I don’t consider
ghostscript as a GNOME app, and I think that by linking ghostscript
to GNOME, we would have a dangerous precedent. Wouldn’t it be much
more reasonable to have ghostscript kept apart from any desktop
environment? Different versions could be developed for the specific
desktop environment, but it should always be based on the same
central “desktop independent” source code. Even some GNOME users
are skeptical about it as a post underlined on GNotice. Alfonso
Landin makes a good point by saying: “If the mantainer want to do a
particular version supporting GdkRGB and Bonobo, i will welcome it,
but it should be forked, and not shipped with the project.” I’m
sorry if the next sentence irritates people, but it makes me think
of some M$ tactics 😉 I have the hope this is not the motivation
of Raph. As maintainer of ghostscript, I hope he will be able to
think objectively about the development of his project, just as
Linus greatly did (and still does) for the Linux kernel. The goal
of ghostscript is to be useful for as much people as possible. It
should not force people to install GTK or GNOME libraries to use
it.
I hope this letter will be the start of a calm discussion .