GNOME 3.11.2 Has Many Changes

[intellivision]

The OpenBSD crowd does a good job for now. But 3.12 is another beast than 3.10.

They will port it. It will happen because OpenBSD developers are great at their job.

[RahulSundaram]

It seems to me that we have to agree to disagree on the definition of portability.
For me portability means: "We change the software in a way that it can support different platforms."
From what I see your (and the Gnome developers) definition of portability is "We change the platform in a way that it supports the software."

Hint: Do not use quotation marks unless you are actually showing a quotation and if you are, you should reference it.

I have conclusively shown that your analogy of Wine was deeply flawed. So you are backtracking at this point but still making up a false dichotomy. In reality, high levels stacks such as desktop environments influence the base platform development and vice versa. It is NOT either or but BOTH.

[Vim_User]

No. It totally didn't. Wine has to reimplement 100 percent of the code. GNOME code can actually be ported with abstractions dealing with small number of platform specific changes.

It seems to me that we have to agree to disagree on the definition of portability.
For me portability means: "We change the software in a way that it can support different platforms."
From what I see your (and the Gnome developers) definition of portability is "We change the platform in a way that it supports the software."

I personally see the second as inherently flawed, but that is just my opinion, like you have yours. I doubt that this will go anywhere, so lets just stop.

[RahulSundaram]

It is irrelevant if the underlying system is proprietary or patent encumbered for sake of portability. You may be right that there are undocumentated parts of certain APIs, but if a Windows program only uses the well documented parts of the Windows APIs and runs well in Wine it totally fits your definition of portability.

No. It totally didn't. Wine has to reimplement 100 percent of the code. GNOME code can actually be ported with abstractions dealing with small number of platform specific changes.

[Vim_User]

Windows is an operating system with a signficant amount of proprietary, patent encumbered and even undocumented API that has to be reverse engineered by Wine, none of which meet the criteria I listed.

It is irrelevant if the underlying system is proprietary or patent encumbered for sake of portability. You may be right that there are undocumentated parts of certain APIs, but if a Windows program only uses the well documented parts of the Windows APIs and runs well in Wine it totally fits your definition of portability.
I don't get why that is, but for some reason you seem to think portability means not that your software supports different platforms, you seem to think that it is up to the platform to support your software.
Portability means: "Our software supports platforms that are not our main focus". It does not mean "We declare our software to be portable, so get your shit together and change your platform in a way that our software can run on it".

[RahulSundaram]

According to that definition any Windows software that runs on Wine can claim to be portable. I call bullshit.

Windows is an operating system with a signficant amount of proprietary, patent encumbered and even undocumented API that has to be reverse engineered by Wine, none of which meet the criteria I listed. GNOME is a free and open source desktop environment and all of the interfaces are explicitly documented or you can just read the source and do the port. Your comparison makes no sense whatsoever.

[Vim_User]

Have you ever done any portability work? I suspect not. It is not the job of GNOME to make sure that everything is supported everywhere. It has never worked that way and never will. It is purely a best effort thing. GNOME can provide interfaces and document them clearly (including stable vs unstable features) and that is the extend of its portability efforts. It is the job of other operating system developers to provide the implementation or port the existing one to their platform.

According to that definition any Windows software that runs on Wine can claim to be portable. I call bullshit.

[Melissa001]

The OpenBSD crowd does a good job for now. But 3.12 is another beast than 3.10.

[RahulSundaram]

When they are using interfaces that are simply not available on other platform they do not have portability in mind. Portability means to make sure that a software is fully supported on different platforms.

Have you ever done any portability work? I suspect not. It is not the job of GNOME to make sure that everything is supported everywhere. It has never worked that way and never will. It is purely a best effort thing. GNOME can provide interfaces and document them clearly (including stable vs unstable features) and that is the extend of its portability efforts. It is the job of other operating system developers to provide the implementation or port the existing one to their platform.

[Vim_User]

I would say GNOME uses features in Linux because most GNOME developers use Linux as a platform. They do use interfaces whenever possible as opposed to relying on specific implementations directly. Those shows concern for portability. Nothing further can be done other than to avoid innovating or integrating at all. It seems like you want GNOME to claim that they don't care because you don't agree with their approach. That is unlikely to happen as you are not a contributor.

When they are using interfaces that are simply not available on other platform they do not have portability in mind. Portability means to make sure that a software is fully supported on different platforms. It does not mean to simply say "Here, we are using these interfaces, if you want our software on your OS you have to rebuild them 1:1!". That is exactly what they are doing. Also, it doesn't matter if I am a contributor or not, obviously false statements (Gnome aims for portability) will not suddenly become true just because I contribute or not.