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The following links might be interesting to read:

1, 2, 3, 4.

Nautilus --which has a large set of developers and a lot of work going towards it-- is really one of the core components of the desktop. I am sorry for Alan if there are not too many hackers working on new IRC clients, or on new color selectors, I think that overall, we are more focused on the problems of users than we were in the past.

Components like Evolution contain some killer features that will help a lot of people transition to Linux, and the kind of work and effort required to develop an application of this size is not trivial. Just supporting every feature correctly for IMAP and broken IMAP servers is a daunting task. Having the best syncronizing tool for PalmPilots and for syncing multiple devices is also an important feature not available anywhere else (not to mention vFolders, quick searches, great user interfaces and more).

Both applications (Nautilus and Evolution) rely on very new technologies that are at the core of GNOME

Also, look at things like the Ximian Setup Tools, which are just a set of GNOME applications (branded by my company, to get some credit for the work we are putting on it) that addresses the major problem of having a user-friendly unified system configuration for Unix (here)

Our work on the Bonobo foundation is unparalleled. Once we started deploying it, many new ideas came out (like Monikers) that have enabled extremely powerful mechanisms to be created.

We sadly do not have white-papers for all of our technologies, but we are working towards documenting them. If you are interested in helping, get in touch with me.

A few things we have recently done and are shipping as part of GNOME 1.4:

• Bonobo 1.0 Ready to ship with GNOME 1.4

• GtkHTML: An HTML editor and rendering engine.

• EBrowser: A Bonobo component to do web browsing

• Gnome Spell: A Bonobo component for doing spelling, suggestions, and dictionary lookups. All available to any application that supports Bonobo.

• Gnome VFS: Access any resources on the network transparently.

Other things like Gtk from frame buffers and Pango are developed at the RHAD Labs (http://www.labs.redhat.com) and constitute part of the core technologies in GNOME 2.0

Miguel.

A lot of work is going into shifting towards the GNOME 2.0 platform,
which is why there is a slowdown into hacking the "core" of the
system. Most of the work is going towards making the 2.0 platform a
great platform.
--

It seems that their corparate ties with Ximian, Eazel and Sun are causing real trouble. Apparently they have lost nearly all of their voluntary work force after the GNOME Foundation was announced. Couple of quotes I saw in gnome-hackers list. These are core developers, not some random guys:

Alan Cox:
"...there are not enough people working on gnome infrastructure/site admin to keep up with the demands of these because most folks are busy working on their rival Ximian or Eazel projects and so the number of effective actual gnome core contributions has dropped massively rather than risen as might originally have been expected."

link

Matthias Warkus:
"Looking at the CVS logs, no one seems to be really working on the core anymore. Pretty much all of the code commits go into Nautilus, Gnumeric, Evolution and Eazel's and Ximian's supporting and surrounding technology and tools.

I think we're at the point where we should ask ourselves whether the GNOME Project can still be considered a living entity at all. And whether it's a good move to, at this point, tie our next release to Nautilus, which, however cool, is essentially a third-party product with the main purpose of generating revenue for Eazel. If we go on "outsourcing" software that way, we might end up with a "GNOME desktop" which is not much more than lots of commercial free software bundled together haphazardly."

link

Is their situation really this bad?

It seems that their corparate ties with Ximian, Eazel and Sun are causing real trouble. Apparently they have lost nearly all of their voluntary work force after the GNOME Foundation was announced. Couple of quotes I saw in gnome-hackers list. These are core developers, not some random guys:

Alan Cox:
"...there are not enough people working on gnome infrastructure/site admin to keep up with the demands of these because most folks are busy working on their rival Ximian or Eazel projects and so the number of effective actual gnome core contributions has dropped massively rather than risen as might originally have been expected."

link

Matthias Warkus:
"Looking at the CVS logs, no one seems to be really working on the core anymore. Pretty much all of the code commits go into Nautilus, Gnumeric, Evolution and Eazel's and Ximian's supporting and surrounding technology and tools.

I think we're at the point where we should ask ourselves whether the GNOME Project can still be considered a living entity at all. And whether it's a good move to, at this point, tie our next release to Nautilus, which, however cool, is essentially a third-party product with the main purpose of generating revenue for Eazel. If we go on "outsourcing" software that way, we might end up with a "GNOME desktop" which is not much more than lots of commercial free software bundled together haphazardly."

link

Is their situation really this bad?

Some of the wackier GNOME hackers are working on a VB clone, and it already runs simple forms and such (there's even a hack to run VB .ASP webpages). They're also planning to use it in Gnumeric to allow full macro compatibility with Excel. That would be a big boost to free/open software if they achieve flawless Excel import/export (it already works very well on all the .xls files I've tried).

No need to immediately leap to conclusions.

To quote Vladimir Vukicevic off Gnome News: "One of the things that red carpet demands currently is that the database (especially for rpm) be in a consistent state. This is often not the case, especially on systems that have been around for a while."

So if any packages have dependency problems which Red Carpet can't fulfil by installing a necessary package, it instead prompts you to remove them. Which means that if, for example, your installation of QT has a dependency problem (as mine did), you will be prompted to remove most of KDE.

Rather than uninstalling, though, you can just sort out the conflict. In my case the problem was a hand-compiled version of Mesa (for my voodoo card). I should have built an RPM when I compiled it, but a quick rpm --justdb on a generic Mesa RPM left the files as they were but updated the database as necessary. Presto!

(PS Future versions of Red Carpet will tell you more about the nature of the conflicts, and hopefully help you deal with them more constructively)

Years after the virtues of XML were first extolled XML still isn't the do-all, be-all wonder we were led to believe.

GNOME wasn't built in a day.

Medusa FAQ:

1. How is medusa different than slocate?

Medusa is able to find files by their names quickly. However, medusa is also able to find files by their path, size, content, and owner, or in any combination.

2. Indexing takes a long time! When will this get better?

Indexing your whole drive does take a long time, and we hope to improve this as much as possible. To some degree, however, this is a byproduct of the slowness of hard drives. However, we hope to introduce "incremental" indexing soon, so that files will only get reindexed when they are altered after the last indexing.

Medusa FAQ:

1. How is medusa different than slocate?

Medusa is able to find files by their names quickly. However, medusa is also able to find files by their path, size, content, and owner, or in any combination.

2. Indexing takes a long time! When will this get better?

Indexing your whole drive does take a long time, and we hope to improve this as much as possible. To some degree, however, this is a byproduct of the slowness of hard drives. However, we hope to introduce "incremental" indexing soon, so that files will only get reindexed when they are altered after the last indexing.

It's HTTP, not FTP.

Note that there is a offical test plan at:
http://www.gnome.org/~mjs/gnome-test-plans/

Note that there is a offical test plan at:
http://www.gnome.org/~mjs/gnome-test-plans/

(From news.gnome.org)

For the convenience of those who find building from source too daunting, Ximian will soon be making binary packages available for a variaty of platforms.

If one doesn't have the technical experience to compile a beta, they probably shouldn't be using first-gen beta software.

This might be of some interest for you.

Good news for you: there is now a very pretty GUI version of Nethack called GnomeHack. If you love Nethack, you will want this!

This has been folded into the official Nethack distribution, so it no longer exists as a separate project.

If you use RPMs, do a Google search for "GnomeHack" and you will find lots of sites that have them. If you are a Debian user, you can get this with apt-get.

Here's a review of GnomeHack.

steveha

Ever heard of mc?

GnomeOffice Dia is a UML-based diagramming and vector graphics app. You can extend it with XML/UML (and conforms to the full UML spec as defined by its XML DTD) and it supports a plethora of standard graphics formats for inport and export. There are numerous documents on the web that use Dia as an example of learning XML/UML programming to a DTD spec.

-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith

GTK 2 will have a different default look; to get an idea what it will be like, try the "Raleigh" theme Owen released for GTK 1.2, which is sort of a prototype for the GTK 2 look. It removes some of the Motif-esque ugliness and looks cleaner. Still a simple, fast theme, no MacOS-X snazziness, but of course the point of themes is that you can switch them. ;-) For the default we want something that will be fast over a remote X display (and fast in general), not use too much memory, and reasonably conservative overall.

I think it's fair to say that the primary focus of GTK 2, aside from a few major features (Unicode/Pango, text/tree widgets) was API usability. GTK 2 should be a good bit easier to program. Basically as soon as we notice a FAQ or a question with no good answer on the support mailing lists, we file a Bugzilla bug and try to fix that problem via API enhancements. Better to eliminate the need to ask a question than to add it to the FAQ.

There are also various end-user usability enhancements, such as improved focus handling, etc.

Specific suggestions are welcome in Bugzilla.

Pretty much as soon as IBM's ViaVoice toolkit was available GVoice came out. From memory it lets you bind voice accelerators in the same way you bind keyboard accelerators. Check out this article about it in the GNOME summary from June 1999.

It looks to me like the logo is a merge of:

1. The Linux Penguin, Tux: note the black feathers and beak.
2. The BSD Daemon: note the fork. (Officially it has no name according to the copyright holder Marshall Kirk McKusick. But some call it Beastie -- 'bsd'.)
3. The Free Software Foundation mascot, GNU: note the horns.
4. The GNOME "G": note the feet.

Cheers,
Andrew

Gtk+ is one of the finest examples of software engineering I've ever seen. By extension, I'm including glib. Check out these documents for most of my reasoning:

The Gtk+ FAQ
The gobject reference
Tic Tac Toe in Gtk+

As for the GUI, what do you think Gnome and KDE have been doing?

Back under your bridge, troll...

But this is pretty cool for platform with no X, or for ports (say BeOS, or Mac OS X).

For ports, "this", in the sense of GTK+-fb, isn't relevant; what's relevant is that ports can be done, to a large extent, by changing the GDK layer, rather than by changing stuff all over GTK+.

I think the Win32 port, which antedates the frame buffer port, was also done largely at the GDK layer.

There are people working on a BeOS version of GTK+ - there's a GTK+ for BeOS page on the GTK+ Web site, and somebody's been sending patches to the gtk-devel mailing list.

To add some extra creepiness, it could well be... you guessed it, Windows.

Why is everyone so convinced that Linux has to be prettied up, promoted, and made palatable to the masses?

Because the masses have money. Companies like money. Companies that see the prospect of money in Linux on the desktop are more likely to publish Linux ports of their video games, write Linux drivers for their hardware, and offer Linux-compatible ISP services and online media.

I like Linux game, Linux drivers, and Linux compatibility. Any more questions?

There are many more reasons why even the most hardcore, non-gaming, free-software-only Linux user still benefits by "Linux for the masses", though. You may complain that Red Hat is aiming for a Linux distribution a 3 year old can use... but they're not taking away our Perl interpreters and ssh daemons to do it, and eventually that 3 year old may grow up and spend a little time playing around with the compiler himself.

The other thing that's "vital for desktop acceptance" is an office suite of the caliber of MS Office 2000, which isn't going to happen unless they decide to port it.

Of course it isn't. Free software developers could never produce any sort of useful desktop software on their own, certainly not any office programs. That stuff is just too complicated for a bunch of hackers. Why, where would they even start?

Ever heard of a good opensource game? Freeciv? LOL.

What about TOD? or Hampsterdeath? or Tux Racer? Or any of the many cross-platform Allegro games? Or the entire GNOME Entertainment collection? I forgive you for not having looked hard enough.

Take a look at the GConf library. It uses a standard API for programs to access their configuration data and stores this individual conf files using XML, and is already in use by Nautilus and Evolution. It probably wouldn't be too hard to extend this program to work under Windows or whatever OS you like.

My catchall help source is Google's Linux Search I can't comment on any general purpose linux help books, becuase I haven't used any.

-jef

Check out the article on Gnotices. Owen has added OpenType support to freetype and Pango. It uses the XRender extension to achieve this.
----

GNOME is not just a "desktop environment". It's a complete application framework and it includes GTK+. Check out developer.gnome.org for more information.
----

The Media is thoroughly confused, but this isn't news to anyone. I'm tired, too, of hearing about the "Eazel" desktop environment. Don't get me wrong. I love what Eazel, and other companies are doing for open source projects such as Gnome. I just dislike the Media's gross misunderstanding of the relationship between the Community and the Corporation. One wonders of the Media will ever really grasp the beast known as the Open Source/Free Software Community and how it integrates with the business models of companies such as Red Hat, Eazel, and Helix Code. "They" don't seem to fully grasp the idea that the Community (project, source, forums) is an entity separate from the Corporation, yet a part of it with a powerful relationship. The Corporation may enhance the Community, providing resources that the Community might not be able to provide on it's own, yet if the Corporation were to die, the Community would live on. And the Corporation very much feeds on the Community.
----

Nothing is preventing this. GTK+ uses an abstraction layer called GDK which sits between the widgets and the underlying windowing system (Windows, X, etc.). To get GTK+ working in Windows, you port the GDK to the Windows windowing layer. This has already been done (though not perfected, IIRC). You can, for example, run a Windows native version of the Gimp.
----

Nothing is preventing this. GTK+ uses an abstraction layer called GDK which sits between the widgets and the underlying windowing system (Windows, X, etc.). To get GTK+ working in Windows, you port the GDK to the Windows windowing layer. This has already been done (though not perfected, IIRC). You can, for example, run a Windows native version of the Gimp.
----

GNOME on Windows? Perverse! Why not integrate GNOME parts into the Linux kernel while they're at it! Oh wait, they already did :)

But seriously, this is very cool and even if YOU don't see any value in any of this, someone else will undoubtedly use it to make some cool stuff. People who bitch about projects like this (and especially Mozilla) don't always realize that the code is almost always developed for fun by volunteers. The time a volunteer spent coding the IRC client for Mozilla would likely not have been spent fixing bugs in the main source tree had the project never been started (because that is boring and hard work). But maybe, this volunteer who coded the IRC client for fun, fixed a couple of bugs in the main source tree to resolve issues he discovered while writing his own client. Something worth thinking about.

Therefore I suggest you find some existing project and add some kind of new features to it. Don't pick a huge, complicated project like Mozilla; start small.

As a concrete, specific suggestion: the Gnome version of Freecell has, IMHO, ugly playing cards. There is no way to change them. On the other hand, the Same Gnome game allows the user to load different images for the playing pieces. It might be a good project for you to study Freecell, study the Same Gnome code for loading images, and then modify Freecell to allow the user to load different playing card images.

This is a project that will take a certain amount of studying, but it shouldn't take months of work. To some extent you would be able to cut-and-paste code from Same Gnome, but you would also have to modify it. When it is done you will have something you can show to even your non-techie friends! I'm not trying to tell you what to do, so if you don't like this suggestion do something else.

By the way, if you look at the TODO file in the Gnome Freecell sources, you will notice an item that says "Make card bitmaps library." In other words, my suggestion was already thought up by the people working on Freecell. You might want to look at the various projects and read the notes in each, and perhaps you will see something you really want to work on.

By the way, I have to say I like your attitude. I hope you have lots of fun with this project.

steveha

Therefore I suggest you find some existing project and add some kind of new features to it. Don't pick a huge, complicated project like Mozilla; start small.

As a concrete, specific suggestion: the Gnome version of Freecell has, IMHO, ugly playing cards. There is no way to change them. On the other hand, the Same Gnome game allows the user to load different images for the playing pieces. It might be a good project for you to study Freecell, study the Same Gnome code for loading images, and then modify Freecell to allow the user to load different playing card images.

This is a project that will take a certain amount of studying, but it shouldn't take months of work. To some extent you would be able to cut-and-paste code from Same Gnome, but you would also have to modify it. When it is done you will have something you can show to even your non-techie friends! I'm not trying to tell you what to do, so if you don't like this suggestion do something else.

By the way, if you look at the TODO file in the Gnome Freecell sources, you will notice an item that says "Make card bitmaps library." In other words, my suggestion was already thought up by the people working on Freecell. You might want to look at the various projects and read the notes in each, and perhaps you will see something you really want to work on.

By the way, I have to say I like your attitude. I hope you have lots of fun with this project.

steveha

Therefore I suggest you find some existing project and add some kind of new features to it. Don't pick a huge, complicated project like Mozilla; start small.

As a concrete, specific suggestion: the Gnome version of Freecell has, IMHO, ugly playing cards. There is no way to change them. On the other hand, the Same Gnome game allows the user to load different images for the playing pieces. It might be a good project for you to study Freecell, study the Same Gnome code for loading images, and then modify Freecell to allow the user to load different playing card images.

This is a project that will take a certain amount of studying, but it shouldn't take months of work. To some extent you would be able to cut-and-paste code from Same Gnome, but you would also have to modify it. When it is done you will have something you can show to even your non-techie friends! I'm not trying to tell you what to do, so if you don't like this suggestion do something else.

By the way, if you look at the TODO file in the Gnome Freecell sources, you will notice an item that says "Make card bitmaps library." In other words, my suggestion was already thought up by the people working on Freecell. You might want to look at the various projects and read the notes in each, and perhaps you will see something you really want to work on.

By the way, I have to say I like your attitude. I hope you have lots of fun with this project.

steveha

Gtk might be as easy, I just haven't looked.

This mail message to "gtk-devel" from Owen Taylor" says

...the xrender extension, which we will be supporting in GTK+ soon...

(presumably meaning in the main CVS branch; i.e., it'll eventually be in 2.0, but probably not 1.2[.x]).

Yeah, you could have just clicked on the link in the previous post, but I felt it would be better to elaborate a bit. :)

Thanks to the tireless efforts of those rare individuals who challenge the impossible, we now know that we can do it. Alex Chiu knows this, and Alex Chiu is a shining example of the American capitalist motto, YOU CAN DO IT!©

Just because you elitist, long haired socialist hippie open-source freaks think nothing can be accomplished unless it is free doesn't mean you can poop on the efforts of those gifted imagineers that dare to dream the impossible. I don't know what they teach you in those dens of homosexual debauchery known as British boarding schools, but here in the free world, A.K.A. US to the motherfuckin' A, they teach us three things:

1. You have the right to own a gun
2. You have the right to shoot anyone who says otherwise
3. The only good software is software YOU PAY FOR
4. YOU CAN DO IT!©

In one of your other posts, you mentioned banner ads without font smoothing/antialiasing. The GIMP does antialiasing. As for colour matching, I never had a need for it, but I never did professional publishing. When I need colour accuracy, I paint by numbers.

I see the lack of Truetype as a greater impedement to amateur desktop publishing. Truetype is excellent for people who care about what their work looks like while they're making it, but it is not as good as other font formats for the final output (Think small caps, character kerning etc.). And Linux, unlike Windows 3.1 doesn't support Truetype, it supports hacking truetype into an X-like font, or rendering truetype on the screen, but linux, unlike Windows 3.1 has no underlying printing architecture.

Read up on why Abiword uses Truetype under Windows, but not under Linux for more information:

http://www.abisource.com/faquser.phtml #2. 7

Besides, with no printing architecture (which I believe Gnome is working on correcting), you certainly couldn't do ICC on printers anyways.

http://developer.gnome.org /ar ch/imaging/printing.html -- I hope somebody's touched that since its September 1998 date.

That about exhausts my knowledge of printing, fonts and graphics. Some day I'll have to get my hands dirty on these projects.

What exactly is the purpose of the KDE foundation?

The GNOME foundation is easy for me to understand, it is a means for companies with talented teams of developers to contribute to the GNOME project, similar to the way IBM works with Open Source developers on the Apache project and has many members on the Apache Foundation's steering comittee (if it's called that) and Netscape works with Mozilla and has a lot of it's developers guiding Mozilla's development. In fact the GNOME press release expressly states that it is modelled after the Apache Foundation

On the other hand, the KDE foundation makes very little sense to me. KDE is an Open Source project, not a commercial endeavour, so why does it need a huge multi-corporation PR-team? Interestingly the KDE press release goes out of its way to state that this is merely a marketing (i.e. propoganda) machine. I'm sorry but I'm a developer, and the idea of an Open Source project forming large ties with commercial entities for the express purpose of out-marketting another Open Source project feels awkward and doesn't sit right with me.

Am I the only one that is slightly disturbed by this?

Second Law of Blissful Ignorance

The Gnome Foundation oversees Gnome development, whereas the KDE League is a single point of contact for marketing: it exists to "provide financial, moral and promotional support to KDE", to quote the PR, and promises to leave development as a freely-coordinated effort of the developers. Both groups are useful entities IMO, although ISTM a bit ironic that the one with reportedly larger market share on the desktop is launching a marketing initiative. :) I am curious as to how the League was formed: were there elections, as for Gnome Foundation and FreeBSD Core Team? There is, unfortunately, no further info on the KDE League's website just yet.

Konqueror is very good. I have played around with it. However, I personally think that Nautilus' architecture is better. If you've never looked closely at the architecture, tak e a peek. Also, in terms of aesthetics, Nautilus does some really sweet things, like the music views, package views, mouse-over sound playing when in icon view, preview of text in icons, zooming in and out, transparent rubber-banded box for icon selection, emblems for icons, notes for any item in the world. Very impressive.
----

The current methods listed are:

• bzip2
• gzip
• cdda
• efs
• extfs (stuff from mc)
• file (local access)
• pipe
• nfs

Well, as an AbiWord developer, I feel it neccessary to clear up some misconceptions here.

(1) The GNOME Foundation is evil.
This is simple untrue. The GNOME Foundation is a good idea, will be democratically run, and is led by some great people.

(2) GNOME has made official decisons
According to Havoc Pennington and others, no specific decisions have been made by GNOME people. I believe them on this.

(3) Sun actually understands this other than as a way to make money.
Anyone who thinks that Sun is after anything but money is deluding themselves. Sadly, it also appears they still haven't got the open standards idea.

For LOTS more on this, see my posting to abiword-dev, among others, her e.
Sam TH

The reporter you quote there chose to "selectively" quote Dom, and "selectively" quote Havoc.

Although both wanted to convey a different story, the reporter chose to push forward his own agenda. You can mail Dom and ask him, and you can mail Havoc and ask him.

You can read the archives of the gnome-office-list where the discussion and a complete explanation can be found:

Dom's explanation is here:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-office-list/2 000-October/msg00003.html. And Havoc's post (Evan, the reporter, chose not to write anything Havoc said) is here:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-office-list/2 000-October/msg00000.html

Best wishes,

Miguel

The reporter you quote there chose to "selectively" quote Dom, and "selectively" quote Havoc.

Although both wanted to convey a different story, the reporter chose to push forward his own agenda. You can mail Dom and ask him, and you can mail Havoc and ask him.

You can read the archives of the gnome-office-list where the discussion and a complete explanation can be found:

Dom's explanation is here:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-office-list/2 000-October/msg00003.html. And Havoc's post (Evan, the reporter, chose not to write anything Havoc said) is here:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-office-list/2 000-October/msg00000.html

Best wishes,

Miguel

"easily be used by suits"

No, you don't. Why oh why oh why would you ever let one of them touch your precious code repository ? Use a tool like doxygen or doc++ to spew some html to keep them busy clicking around. You can integrate it into your build system and have a web page updated every night with the new build. That should be enough to make them think they know what's going on.

But, if you want to waste some resources setting it up, there are ways to browse a CVS repository graphically -- Tk/Tcl and Jave front ends, etc. Check out this one which is a web based interface to the gnome project's cvs repository.

"access control lists on project folders with recursive attributes"

This is interesting and might actually be useful. Just consider that to a large extent, the point of all the history that CVS keeps is so that you can back out of unwise or authorized commits. I think what you really want to do is learn a very good, well thought out scheme for naming and taging branches in the repository, to ease the recovery from mistakes.

Restrictin access should be a rare enough case that you can implement this using the file system. Consider that most projects which are limiting the commit ability of people working on them aren't really using configuration management, they are just using CVS as a networked backup device.

"supports versioning of documents (MSWord, HTML)"

If the file is text, CVS can handle it. Keep your documentation in LaTeX, or in machine parseable comments, and use the various LaTeX tools (like latex2html) to generate the viewable documentation on the fly. If someone absolutely, desperately, in a save-their-life, give-you-a-raise type situation, needs a copy in Word, then the best way I have found to convert is to view the html version (from latex2html) on IE on windows and cut-and-paste the whole thing into Word and save it out. But nothing in Work should matter enough to be kept in configuration management.

"RCS style checkouts where only a single developer . . ."

Why the hell do you want to allow that ? Anyone should be able to at least read the repository, at least within the group or company. I can understand locking commits, but even that should be by code branch, not really directory oriented. People who use that style of development usually aren't checking out and building each other's code enough, or are using the entire repository to keep track of a branch on it's way to final production status, instead of a separate branch or an entirely separate repository. I would make it a clause in this policy not allow that kind of nonsense.

"I'm pretty sure that using pre- and post-checkin scripts and wrapper programs around CVS (better than WinCVS) can make this work, but we don't have the time to write them."

If the developers actually have use for any of the features you mention, then they will find the time to write them; more likely, they will do a news group query or web search and find them already written. There will be no need for allocation of company-wide resources, it will just happen. But if you can waste a huge amount of time throughout the company by mandating a stupid universal policy, why not get a couple of guys to write some scripts ?

What you need to do is step back and consider where this company is really going.

If a company has the mindset that they have to mandate or select a company-wide "unified Configuration Management Policy," then they are doomed. You appear to be sucked into the mindset; my clue here is that you capitialized the phrase. (You did not capitalize "unified," so I hold out hope for you.) There is absolutely no reason for such a beast.

I've worked at a few places where management went through occasional periods of panic, or general low-level unease, about the quality of the product. This was justified. But bad practices like poor configuration management are symptoms, not causes, of the problem. The problem was that people were either just dumb or didn't give a shit. The smart people attended a few meetings, ignored the policy, and got the job done. The people who were the problem attended even more meetings, spent a lot of time writing email and talking about it, and didn't get any smarter.

Is this "unified Configuration Management Policy" actually addressing a problem, or is some manager just nervous because they bought a lot of new companies and he doesn't feel in control ? Maybe you need to gently re-direct their energies toward doing useful stuff, like finding new markets and customers for your products.

Why are you worried about the development time of a few pre and post commit scripts compared to the time you are going to waste talking about this policy ? When managers get all twitchy and sweaty about a few hours of script hacking, but want to implement a company-wide new policy with all the meetings and overhead that comes with it, it is a sign that you are going down.

I might be able to hook you up with a job at my place; but if you want me to get you an interveiw, you have to promise never to capitalize "Configuration Management Policy" like it was the Constitution or something.

What, not enough yet? Join the