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[Rick Moen]

begin  Joakim Ziegler quotation:
 
> I'm not personally familiar with that code.  As I've been explained by
> people who should be, however, there are several reasons for the
> dependencies on core GNOME libraries, some of them being technical in
> nature, that is, canvas uses functionality from those libraries, and
> some others being political, that is, we want to promote the
> installation and use of GNOME as a whole, so we're offering canvas as
> a "carrot".

Some will come to see that carrot as moldy and at best poorly digestible.  
You might be astonished at how many of us already do.  Not only that,
but it's not at all clear that this _is_ a deliberate policy decision,
so much as it is just sloppy design and carelessness.  

And regardless of whether _more_ codebase forks such as CSCHTML emerge
from that tangled mess you guys deign to call a software map, you
already have huge amounts of time spent chasing chains of breakage every
time one piece gets upgraded, and consequent slowness in the development
cycle, people declining to re-use suitable code because they don't want
all the baggage attached to it, inability to improve software interfaces
because of the aforementioned chain of breakage, excessive numbers of
people to involve whenever something _must_ be changed, and difficulty
porting code because of all the crud that must be ported with it. 

The above points are in no way original to me; they're condensed from
Havoc Pennington's post, which you really should read for yourself.

But, the gist of it is that this "Trust us; it's for everyone's own good"
approach just doesn't fly.  And it's in fact one of the obvious ways to
fail.

> I'm a little surprised to have logical fallacies pointed out on this
> list, though.

If I _weren't_ madly devoted to being contrary, that itself wouldn't be
very crackmonkey, would it?

-- 
Cheers,                              "Open your present...."
Rick Moen                            "No, you open your present...."
rick (at) linuxmafia.com             Kaczinski Christmas.
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