Slashdot Mirror

Note:

• GNOME Canvas ;
• It's not clear what there may be that is equivalent with KDE, but there will likely be something, whether in KDE or in Qt;
• GnuStep will support whatever the underlying infrastructure does, and it would make a lot of sense to get Display Ghostscript to do anti-aliasing...

Long and short is that it may be quite appropriate to have antialiasing managed within application libraries as opposed to directly in X.

I can understand why this would be confusing. The Gnome software map you are refering to is just a list of Gnome software, not necessarily software that is part of the Gnome Project proper. If you check out the releng module in Gnome CVS you'll see a list of packages that will be included in Gnome 1.4. At the bottom of the list you'll notice that mc will not be included in the core release of Gnome. That's because Nautilus is replacing it. Nautilus is part of the Gnome Project, not just a third-party add-on for Gnome.
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I can understand why this would be confusing. The Gnome software map you are refering to is just a list of Gnome software, not necessarily software that is part of the Gnome Project proper. If you check out the releng module in Gnome CVS you'll see a list of packages that will be included in Gnome 1.4. At the bottom of the list you'll notice that mc will not be included in the core release of Gnome. That's because Nautilus is replacing it. Nautilus is part of the Gnome Project, not just a third-party add-on for Gnome.
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I can understand why this would be confusing. The Gnome software map you are refering to is just a list of Gnome software, not necessarily software that is part of the Gnome Project proper. If you check out the releng module in Gnome CVS you'll see a list of packages that will be included in Gnome 1.4. At the bottom of the list you'll notice that mc will not be included in the core release of Gnome. That's because Nautilus is replacing it. Nautilus is part of the Gnome Project, not just a third-party add-on for Gnome.
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KDE is the desktop environment. It runs on top of XFree86, which is what controls the overall graphics. When you say that KDE is better than XFree86, you must be confusing XFree86 with Gnome, another desktop environment available under and the X Window system.

According to the company history:

Prolog Development Center (PDC) was founded in 1984 with the development of a Prolog compiler - later to be known as Turbo Prolog, PDC Prolog and now Visual Prolog as its main activity. Since then PDC has established itself as a world leader in the development of Prolog and related products.

Today, PDC consists of an R&D and a consultancy division. The R&D Division is concerned with the development of the Visual Prolog compiler together with new methodologies and development tools.

Borland might be an evidence against the common contention that "Microsoft is the company that never produces anything, but merely buys out products from other companies that are creative," as many of Borland's products were not natively produced, but rather resold on behalf of other componies.

By the way, that was Ashton Tate that used to own the dBase trademark...

As for integration with DBM variants, I see little importance to that. InterBase is a relational database (or at least, as relational as they come), as opposed to merely being a data store. The value would be in sharing code between InterBase and PostgreSQL or MySQL, or maybe using InterBase as a "data store" for persistent data in KDE or GNOME.

Do you have any idea how many different ways there are to type chinese? (at least 18 different imput methods if memory serves me)

Do you have any idea how many different and incompatible character sets there are for Chinese? (at least 3 completely different ones)

Do you have any idea how few of the total chinese characters are even represented in a complete UNICODE font? (I think unicode font includes about 20,000 Chinese, Japanese, Korean glyphs while Chinese has over 80,000 characters)

add on a batch of other languages with accents above, below, or on either side of character, and then start thinking about right to left text input. (arabic, hebrew, ...)

If I were them, I'd put some serious cash into the following:

1. First and foremost, web browser development. Put some serious capital behind the Mozilla project, to make up for the lack of support from Netscape/AOL. As Dave Whitinger pointed out, losing the Browser battle could lose us the War. Mozilla has the potential to be a much better browser than Internet Explorer, especially once it becomes XML and SGML compliant. If you can build perl and python interpreters into Mozilla, you have an IE slayer.
2. Linux Laptop development. Linux is a pain in the rear when it comes to laptops; if VA could start selling them commercially, they would have a virtual lock on the market.
3. Start putting some major capital into open source office suites like KOffice or GNOME Office. This is much less necessary than (1) or (2) since there already exist excellent office suites for Linux (including StarOffice), but it may still be a very good idea just-in-case Sun decides to pull the plug on Linux support, in favor of (say) Solaris 8 for Intel.

> if you're going to start comparing it to MS Office, > you'd better back it up with something that's a good, valid point. I wanna shoot first, Me Me Me! Excel has this stupid limit of 65536 rows in a spreadsheet. Dunno if that's true for Excel 2000, but it's true for Excel 97. It's not that difficult to allow sheets of arbitrary size - see Gnumeric source for proof. This shows why it's crazy to trust your future with Microsoft - that's something simple which has bugged me since 1993 and they've still not fixed it, and there's f*** all I can do about it.

We are a small Internet development shop, running a few servers and a mixed bag of development stations. Currently, there are three Linux boxen on our network, running the latest RedHat releases. We are looking to put in three more systems, for a total of 5 running some Linux/UNIX like OS.

• A MySQL server box
• A Firewall
• A Mail/Fileserver
• 2 Webservers running Apache / PHP(Zend)

When we perform this upgrade, we are willing to change operating systems if there is a demonstrable benefit. Due to recent slashdot postings we have started looking at OpenBSD as our server OS. Now, we do understand that RedHat is not the only Linux distribution available, but we don't really want to get into a Linux/Linux war here. We don;t mind changing if we should for technical reasons - but the Linux world seems more hip and vibrant, and we really like the penguin T-shirts we have... so if we can stay on Linux then we want to.

So far, we like what we hear about OpenBSD - but we don't know if the things we like are inherent in the relative designs of OpenBSD or if they are results of policy choices by the OpenBSD team. If they are the results of policy decisions, then with any luck a Linux distribution could be found that exhibited the same characteristics?

Features we like about OpenBSD:

• It seems like the release/testing cycle is extremely carefully controlled. While a freewheeling machine with lots of OpenSource code on the desktop is a good thing, for a server it seems that a smaller group exercising testing/release control is a more controlled system.
• The integrated crypto looks great, the one time use passwords look like a big winner here.
• There are a lot of references to OpenBSD's security and stability - but none with any specific examples or technical backing.
• The file layout on OpenBSD seems like a winner, it looks like things live in a well thought out and logical set up - not in a mishmash like RedHat.

Assumptions:

These systems will be running the server software they need, and X11 + (Gnome||KDE) for administration and so on. They will not be running the latest stuff from Linuxberg or a bunch of things that would be on a desktop OS. So we are going to try very hard not to introduce any instabilities. We aren't going to be compiling running games, sound drivers and the like that integrate directly into the kernel.

The questions are:

1. Is OpenBSD more secure in some fundamental way that a well maintained Linux distribution?
2. Is OpenBSD more stable than a well maintained Linux distribution?
3. Will the OpenSource software we normally need (firewall, Apache, PHP4, Perl, Python) and so on probably compile on OpenBSD?
4. Does OpenBSD have something like clustering support (Beowulf) and failover?
5. Is the performance of a well maintained OpenBSD system better than a well maintained Linux distribution?
6. Does Linux have anything like the one time use password system?
7. Does OpenBSD support multiple CPU's better then Linux?

Thanks for taking the time, and hopefully we can keep the flames down to nothing and talk about technical issues this time.

Now would you please ADD some serious multilingual support fast?

I wanna be able to write, read Arabic and view web pages in that language!

Proper multilingual support is most definitely one of the things that Red Hat is putting its people's time into. You might want to see the GNOME I18N information, and in particular, from that page, Owen Taylor's Internationalization in GTK+ whitepaper. To quote:

Future plans include suppport for the Unicode standard and languages written in a right-to-left direction.

Now would you please ADD some serious multilingual support fast?

I wanna be able to write, read Arabic and view web pages in that language!

Proper multilingual support is most definitely one of the things that Red Hat is putting its people's time into. You might want to see the GNOME I18N information, and in particular, from that page, Owen Taylor's Internationalization in GTK+ whitepaper. To quote:

Future plans include suppport for the Unicode standard and languages written in a right-to-left direction.

Yeah. And sure those Gnomes for Gnotices. What the heck, file a patent for electronic transmission of a page with columns on the left and/or right, and articles containing titles in a different color, with a link to "Read More..." Yup, that's the only way to solve it. Of course, Slashdot infringes on that patent involving dynamically generating a page from a database... They should be sued too, yeah!

That appears to be the Qt Way of handling printing.

It is interesting to contrast with other methods that have been used historically and recently:

• NeXtStep, and now GNUstep, use Display Postscript
• Adobe has restricted future access to commercial DPS, and hence Apple OS-X plans to use PDF as a display substrate to replace DPS.
• The GNOME Project has created an imaging model that seems to parallel Display Postscript that, as the GNOME Canvas, is also displayable.
• Less well-known is libprint

It is not clear whether or not KDE is using the QtPainter facility, or whether there is need for something like GNOME Canvas...

That appears to be the Qt Way of handling printing.

It is interesting to contrast with other methods that have been used historically and recently:

• NeXtStep, and now GNUstep, use Display Postscript
• Adobe has restricted future access to commercial DPS, and hence Apple OS-X plans to use PDF as a display substrate to replace DPS.
• The GNOME Project has created an imaging model that seems to parallel Display Postscript that, as the GNOME Canvas, is also displayable.
• Less well-known is libprint

It is not clear whether or not KDE is using the QtPainter facility, or whether there is need for something like GNOME Canvas...

Do what you like, but take a look at http://www.gnome.org/screenshots/index .shtml Gnome's comming along quite well also (and much nicer looking IMHO (look at the 4th and 5th screenshots)

I read on the Gnome site that they are working on (maybe finished now) a Registry for Gnome.

Do Gnome users need this, Will it open us up to the same problems windows has? Will our software just fail to work after install other software, and will Linux then develope Gnome Worms.

Imagine the evil, an e-mail that changes the Lilo default to boot windoze!

Unix has come a long way in its decades, but we simply would not be in this frantic "information age" if it weren't for the efforts of Micro$oft.

Blasphemy on /.? Hardly!

I don't work for them, I never want to, and I think NT has some fundamental problems (but what software doesn't). It is one of the most feature complete products combined with one that looks deceptively easy to use (and is if you don't scratch the surface).

I love GNOME. I'm learning how to write GNOME apps and have participated online at Gnotices. My father swears by KDE. They are great projects. They are in some ways inovative, but they are also playing catchup to Windows. Yes, they will be much better implementations (come the 2.x releases) of ideas such as [D]COM etc, but what is important to most people is what they can do now and not what they should be able to do at some unspecified time in the future.

If nothing else, they have given us as a community a prototype of how we could implement things later.

David

I don't have the article offhand, but GNotices had something a while ago about how GNOME was converting the official documentation to PNGs/JPGs, and the lack of DocBook support. Apparently, they had already created a patch (or had one far along), and sent it back upstream. So there's not much of a worry there.

Get thee gone to the Gnome developers pages at:


http://developer.gnome.org/


Seriously though, the desktop is becoming less important. The important applications are going to be web based...

What I wouldn't give for a web based accounts app.

Dated? It was released on March, and frozen on November. So it's less than a year old anyhow. I don't think being a year old qualifies Slink as "very dated".

If you're missing Linux 2.2, you can upgrade your slink to it easily. Just remember to look out for trouble. If you want Gnome, there are unofficial updates (with this caveat). There are also other unofficial updates listed on the Slink release page and the unofficial apt sources list.

... you can upgrade to potato ...

Yes you can. But don't do it unless you can stand total system failure. There are no guarantees if you use unstable. That said, I've never personally experienced a total system breakdown due to a bug in unstable, although I've missed a couple with luck.

Think past the Linux box

KDE seems to run fine on my FreeBSD partition; I installed the 1.1.2 binary package a few days ago. Solaris binary packages also exist; people probably run versions from source built on other OSes as well.

Note that the KDE home page says:

KDE is a powerful graphical desktop environment for Unix workstations. It combines ease of use, contemporary functionality and outstanding graphical design with the technological superiority of the Unix operating system.

Note the lack of a certain word beginning with capital "L" in that; they're not targeting Linux, they're targeting UNIX-flavored OSes, including but not limited to Linux.

The GNOME site doesn't say "not for Linux only" on the home page, but the "What is GNOME" part of the GNOME FAQ says nothing about it being targeted only for Linux, and the "What are the system requirements for GNOME" part says

Currently, you need a machine with Unix or a Unix-like operating system installed, with the X Window System (X11R5 or later).

Again, note the use of the U word rather than the L word.

You're probably unlikely to get as much enthusiasm from free software developers for CDE as there is for KDE and GNOME until there's a free CDE implementation (speech, not just beer) - there's LessTif, but it's just a Motif implementation, not a full CDE implementation.

Think past the Linux box

KDE seems to run fine on my FreeBSD partition; I installed the 1.1.2 binary package a few days ago. Solaris binary packages also exist; people probably run versions from source built on other OSes as well.

Note that the KDE home page says:

KDE is a powerful graphical desktop environment for Unix workstations. It combines ease of use, contemporary functionality and outstanding graphical design with the technological superiority of the Unix operating system.

Note the lack of a certain word beginning with capital "L" in that; they're not targeting Linux, they're targeting UNIX-flavored OSes, including but not limited to Linux.

The GNOME site doesn't say "not for Linux only" on the home page, but the "What is GNOME" part of the GNOME FAQ says nothing about it being targeted only for Linux, and the "What are the system requirements for GNOME" part says

Currently, you need a machine with Unix or a Unix-like operating system installed, with the X Window System (X11R5 or later).

Again, note the use of the U word rather than the L word.

You're probably unlikely to get as much enthusiasm from free software developers for CDE as there is for KDE and GNOME until there's a free CDE implementation (speech, not just beer) - there's LessTif, but it's just a Motif implementation, not a full CDE implementation.

Indeed!

Upgrading to NS3 from 4.x is so great, both memory wise and speed (rendering) wise.

Too bad developer.gnome.org doesn't work too well with it :/

You need to check out the Gnome Workshop. KOffice is nice, but there's nothing from with having multiple applications that do the same thing in different ways. It causes innovation.

See here. Duh. Its LGPL.
LGPL libraries can link to a GPL library, but then they will be GPL'ed. Unless there is a source and binary compatible implementation of the lib in non GPLed form - for this you could make a stub, pretend its work in progress, and still use the GPL'ed library in reality if you don't feel like abiding by the spirit of the GPL. This is a bit evil though.

Sitecopy is a very nice little site-management tool that implements WebDAV uploading today.

It comes in a command-line version, or with a GNOME frontend.

(I don't know what you mean about "drag-and-drop management", I haven't used IE5 yet. But it sounds cool. :^))

Since my panel is very stable these days, it is hard to fix crashes in it :)

That's why it's important for users to post bug reports of the panel (and other GNOME programs) to bugs.gnome.org.

Please include stack traces and detailed descriptions of what you were doing... especially if you can reproduce the crash. Otherwise fixing the bugs gets pretty tricky.

Also, in the upcoming 1.0.50 release, you shouldn't get complete panel settings losses when (if) things crash, but maybe an applet or two if Murphy is out to get you.

Gnome status

Thus, while it would be neat to have a whole lot of those "little applications," if it's Rather Difficult to write them, they may not be as little as you'd think/hope.

The document CORBA and You alludes to this somewhat indirectly, indicating that

Keep interface exposition at a high level. Not only does exposing low-level interfaces cause increased dependence upon the internal organization of a software system, but it also means you have to put more code into exporting your interfaces, introducing the risk for more bugs and increasing bloat.

The current style guide is in gnome-libs/devel-docs/suggestions.txt.

presumably meaning in the GNOME source tree.

There's also a page on the KDE developer's site with links to KDE style guide information.

(I think the IBM CUA spec may have influenced Motif and its style guide; given that GTK+'s look and feel somewhat resembles that of Motif, and that Qt offers a Motif L&F as one of its options, and that I think it may also have influenced Windows' style and style guide, which has, in turn, influenced the styles of various UNIX GUI projects, it may be that the CUA has already contributed....)

I don't know to what extent the GUA guides owe a debt to the Mac human interface guidelines. Then again, I just threw that last sentence in to provide an excuse for a link to another on-line style guide....

The current style guide is in gnome-libs/devel-docs/suggestions.txt.

presumably meaning in the GNOME source tree.

There's also a page on the KDE developer's site with links to KDE style guide information.

(I think the IBM CUA spec may have influenced Motif and its style guide; given that GTK+'s look and feel somewhat resembles that of Motif, and that Qt offers a Motif L&F as one of its options, and that I think it may also have influenced Windows' style and style guide, which has, in turn, influenced the styles of various UNIX GUI projects, it may be that the CUA has already contributed....)

I don't know to what extent the GUA guides owe a debt to the Mac human interface guidelines. Then again, I just threw that last sentence in to provide an excuse for a link to another on-line style guide....

People seem to be wondering about GNOME status. Please see this page on the developer site.

I've seen various people say things about the Gimp's interface, like: "I don't like it", or "I'm used to Photoshop, so learning a new interface is a pain". Anyway, this idea bubbled up in my brain as I was walking home yesterday:

One of the projects in the Gnome Software Map is libglade, a library which allows an app to load a user interface definition from Glade (the GTK user interface designer) at runtime, thus enabling user interfaces to be changed and used without a recompile.

My idea was, if the Gimp's interface was designed in Glade, and loaded via libglade, surely it would be possible for people to customise it to their heart's content, and enterprising souls could design and release custom interfaces, eg Photoshop clones, for those who need a tool that "just works" and don't have time to fiddle.

(when I was coding on the Amiga, I originally used an editor called CygnusEd. Then I replace it with one called GoldEd, which had an extremely customisable interface, so I could make all the menus, hotkeys, etc. the same as CygnusEd. This was fantastic, but obviously a lot of work for the programmer - surely something like libglade could allow our major applications such flexibility without demanding too much effort from the developers at all?)

What does anyone think?

Please see http://developer.gnome.org/doc/GGAD for more information about the book.

Keep in mind that one book can't be everything. This is a sort of "intermediate-to-advanced GTK+/Gnome programming manual". An introductory tutorial, complete reference, CORBA book, XML book, etc. would all fill pretty thick books on their own. I already wrote 492 pages instead of the planned 350. :-)

But I think you'll find lots of useful information in my book, and of course you can check it out online at the above URL and decide for yourself.

Learn more about The GNOME Office Suite Miguel

Given the level of activity on both KOffice and the GNOME Workshop, I don't think that there's any question that office applications suites can certainly attract free software developers.

The question remains, will StarOffice under Sun's "Community" license attract developers? I'm doubtful -- how may outside developers actually work on projects that Sun has already applied this license to? AFAIK, it's even less than the number of non-Netscape programmers working on Mozilla.

So I don't see this as a "test" of the open source concept. Put StarOffice under GPL/LGPL, or even the MPL, and this might qualify as a test. But right now, this looks more like "free beer" than "free speech." Not that free beer isn't nice, but it's not the same...

"Cleverness kills wisdom"
-- G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World

This bug(#875) has been reported for months, before the 1.0 release in fact. Yet, after all of the updates, it is still around.

No, I can't fix it myself, becuase I have no idea what is wrong. I looked at the code before, and it wasn't obvious. It would be best for the authors of GMC (or maybe it's the panels fault) to fix it.

Instead of posting inane crap that you know nothing about, read correct information straight from the source.

GNOME Component Architecture white paper

Thanks.

UNIX is a server OS which is making inroads into the desktop marketplace. Windows/Mac OS are desktop operating systems making inroads into the server marketplace.

Windows and a few tag-along friends have been at a decided advantage where bridging the server/desktop gap is concerend. "Any moron can administer" (desktop) equals "cheap sysadmin." "Stable" (server) equals "fewer reboots in the typing pool."

Linux has helped further UNIX's position by adding "cheap" and "popular" to the list of features. Now it's time to really hammer on creating a solid target application environment and, most of all, to focus on ease of use.

There are already countless Linux distributions competing to create the easiest-to-install distribution. The key players know they need to get people up and running painlessly.

But KDE and to a lesser extent, Gnome, represent the next critical step. Fewer of the important players seem to realize (or know what to do about the fact) that ease of use and a consistent desktop are what are going to make or break the huge desktop market for them.

Linux-Mandrake seems to realize this, with their support of David Faure, and FreeBSD seems to be considering methods for a sneak-attack. (There are more KDE threads there.)

Linux or not, whoever can make themselves synonymous with KDE when KOffice and KDE 2.0 go public will have the desktop market locked. Execs will be tripping over each other to be the first to suggest the "stable" "cheap" "popular" and "EASY" OS for every last PC in the place.

Who's it going to be? Will they turn RH into a tiny, forgotten memory? ...will they still remember Linux?

Now that I've gotten your attention with the subject line ... :^)

The issue of access and class/race stratification is an important one, and I'm glad that Jon Katz chose to highlight it for /. However, while he makes a good start at outlining the issues, he then muddies the water by using equitable internet access as a springboard for some unrelated rants about pornography on the internet and blocking software.

Here are some issues where Katz is clearly missing the point or just doesn't get it:

• Sex on the Internet is a legitimate issue
• Blocker software is about empowerment, not censorship

Sex on the Internet is a legitimate issue . Please remember that the First-Amendment, free speech rights are not absolutes. You can't shout "fire!" in a crowded theater, you can't slander or libel without being liable, and you can't distribute obscene materials. Obscenity laws have, in general, been upheld by Supreme Court review (IIRC, particular obscenity laws have been struck down for various reasons, but the concept itself has been upheld as Constitutional). The test is normally "community standards" and "redeeming social value."

The only difficulty that the internet brings to this situation is that the definition of obscenity (and enforcement of obscenity statutes) varies from place to place. When dealing with distribution of physical media, this isn't that much of a problem. You simply end up with results such as Playboy being sold in city A while not being available on shelves in city B. But with the internet, by making something available on the web (or via FTP download), you've managed to "publish" simultaneously in cities A and B (and even countries X, Y, and Z). Which leads directly to the next point ...

Blocker software is about empowerment, not censorship . People like to talk about how "decentralizing" the internet is, but in reality it centralizes in some very key ways. By saying "open the floodgates" to pornography, with no ability to do blocking, you have circumvented the ability of communities and of families to make and enforce their own decisions about what constititues community and family standards. That doesn't look like empowerment to me. If the only possible standard I can apply is the lowest common denominator of the entire world, and everyone needs to apply that standard everywhere, it looks pretty centralized to me.

There are other problems with Katz's essay, such as the relative importance of internet access among problems facing teenagers today, and the lack of mention of how free software can make a difference in providing internet access (such as Mexico's decision to use GNOME rather than some proprietary company's software for their schools, so that they could actually afford to get computers into the classroom. But I don't have time for that today, hopefully someone else will pick up the slack.

Posted by !ErrorBookmarkNotDefined:

OK, so extrasolar didn't hold his punches, but he makes a good point.

Perhaps I should follow up with something like:

We need a Beowulf cluster of the developer.gnome sites.

...just make sure we cover all the cliches.

But here's a better question:
Look at the site. Ask yourself: what isn't here that I need.
Compare it to some other developer connections, like Sun's Java site and Netscape's rat-nest of a developer page.
Now ask of yourself how can I get involved to provide what I think is missing.
Documentation will really help with the acceptance of Linux, I think.


-----------------------------
Computers are useless. They can only give answers.

Posted by !ErrorBookmarkNotDefined:

OK, so extrasolar didn't hold his punches, but he makes a good point.

Perhaps I should follow up with something like:

We need a Beowulf cluster of the developer.gnome sites.

...just make sure we cover all the cliches.

But here's a better question:
Look at the site. Ask yourself: what isn't here that I need.
Compare it to some other developer connections, like Sun's Java site and Netscape's rat-nest of a developer page.
Now ask of yourself how can I get involved to provide what I think is missing.
Documentation will really help with the acceptance of Linux, I think.


-----------------------------
Computers are useless. They can only give answers.

This is all my fault for leaving the kde-devel summary to the last minute.

The network connection manager is meant to do more than just trivially detect whether the line is up or down. It will allow apps to request that the line be brought up or down, and more... It may or may not be implemented with CORBA, but the goal is to make sure KDE and GNOME don't do this in incompatible ways.

Maybe check out Bjoern's page: http://home.netsurf.de/bjoern .kahl/netmgr/index2.html and the list articles for all the proper details.

As far as using third-party components:

• Using GTK on non-Unix platforms was something that even the GTK authors counselled against. Making GTK work on the Mac would be a difficult and time consuming thing, and then you get to the best part: GTK widgets aren't suitable for our HTML-display purposes. You can't do all sorts of things that you need for HTML4, like partial opacity, and there isn't complete Unicode support (a major requirement, which is coming in GTK 1.3, too late for our 5.0 plans). So we really had no choice but to render our own widgets. Sorry, but there was lots of discussion about this in the newsgroups months ago, and that's how it turned out.
• Using libxml isn't really an option at this point, but we _do_ use an external XML parser: expat existed before Mozilla, and is being used by other projects.
• Um, pal, we do use the system libgif and libpng, if they're of the appropriate version:
  [shaver@loonie:components]$ ldd libnspng.so
  libpng.so.2 => /usr/lib/libpng.so.2 (0x4000b000)
  Again -- research! =) And the JPEG library in Mozilla is actually owned partially by Tom Lane of JPEG Group fame, so if you send patches to the canonical libjpeg people, even those without an appropriate version will be able to take advantage of them. (Similarly with libpng and libgif, I believe.)
• There are no cross-platform graphical mail/news readers that I know of, and besides -- you can implement the required interfaces (not many: just a mailto: handler and some logic to get yourself in the menus) and have it call out to mutt or Eudora(tm) or whatever turns you on. (As an aside, you could do that in later 4.0x/4.5 incarnations as well. There's sample code on developer.netscape.com that shows how.) Netscape decided that they wanted to spend resources on developing a cross-platform, standards-based, etc., etc., mail/news client, so they did that.

Now, your objection to having a mail/news client at all is a bit troublesome: are you saying that it was a failure of Mozilla that Netscape wanted a mail/news client that was cross-platform and tightly integrated, etc.? Perhaps you'd have had them work on other things, but then perhaps Netscape would rather have had you hacking on Mozilla for the past year, rather than whatever it is you were doing instead.

As far as ``a Java-specific-interface'', I'll agree that OJI is designed to allow pluggable JVMs, yes. I'm not sure why that's bad; the network protocol API is designed to allow plugging network protocols in as well: that's how those things are designed. There are a lot of rather generic and flexible interfaces in the Mozilla client, though -- what would you like to plug in that you can't? We'll almost always take patches to add better modularity.

(Lots of people will say ``you should be doing this instead of that'', but then...they can't help do that because they don't have the time. Kinda frustrating. At the end of the day, the person writing the code makes the call, though Mozilla exerts influence where it can to make sure that the right thing for the code wins the day. If you've got strong opinions about things, come to the Mozilla newsgroups and share them. It's getting late in the game for major design shifts, but there's still time to make your voice heard in many areas. C'mon out!)

Check out developer.gnome.org. It's still being updated but has quite a bit of information and resources.

I responded to someone wanting to add 3D to Gnome a while back. They felt you could express more information with a third dimension, but they overlooked the fact that human vision is inherently 2D.

In an already 3-dimensional context, it would be helpful to have a 3D extrapolation of the interface -- something that the aforementioned 3dwm seems to be trying to do. But to put a 3D interface onto a 2D display is just glitz.

The human mind does have a proficiency at creating an internal model of a 3D situation, even though it is only perceived with two dimensions. However, while this is useful for understanding inherently three-dimensional situations (as in CAD, for instance) it is not a good way at dealing with other information.

People naturally organize things in a two-dimensional fashion when given the choice. Be it shelves, stacks of papers, tabular information, etc. It is easier and more accessable.

While there are certainly more innovations left to be made in interface, the new directions are much more subtle than 3D.

There is the GTK+ reference documentation project for documentation on the underlying GUI toolkit, and you can go to the GNOME website for documentation on GNOME. There is a revamped GNOME developer web site in development, so this resource will also be available soon.

Try these sites:

www.gnome.org

www.gtk.org

Of course, if you do go with the GIMP, you could get some seriously sharp looking graphs for your extra effort.
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