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KDE 2.2 Tagged
ByTor-2112 writes "According to dot.kde.org, KDE 2.2 has been tagged out. Awesome." Plans were originally to release 2.2 today, but scheduled release is now next Monday, to allow some time for more stability/speed work. 2.2 rocks my world. Excellent work on the part of all the KDE developers. Other dates mentioned are 2.2.1 in September, and opening work up on 3.0, which will hopefully come out at the beginning of 2002.
The only reason that the GNOME core won't be bonoboized is if there isn't enough time before the freeze to do it in. (The GNOME guys are really serious about getting the release out in a timely fashion, they set an early freeze date of July 31 and limited the feature set due to that.) Havoc never had any objections to the GNOME core being bonoboized, the argument was about his library (GConf) being replaced for GNOME 2.0 without his knowledge. The gnome-core maintainers have always planned on bonoboizing the panel (Vertigo), nautilus already uses bonobo, and the control-center is moving away from any embedding mechanism, which was a joint decision with both the Ximian guys (Chema, Zaphod) and Havoc.
Sorry for drifting so far off-topic...
You forgot at least one step. You do have the person read and understand the Makefile, right? I mean, you don't really expect them to "make install" without checking out what is going to happen first. Especially when it's a Makefile that's was stored remotely! Actually, you do mention "make -n" but only to see what's going on when things break.
The reality is that there is a certain level of trust involved in downloading and installing software. If a black hat wants to replace some well known installation package with a trojan, it doesn't really matter whether it's being installed via "lynx -source | sh" or "configure && make && make install". Some people will download the go-gnome.com script and check it out. Most won't. Some people look at Makefile's before they "make install". Most don't. make is just as powerful a scripting language as sh, so it's not like one is "safer" to run as root than another. I agree that it certainly feels as though one is safer than the other, but if you think about it for a little bit, they are basically equivalent. Actually, it's easy to prove that they are equivalent. A Makefile can execute any arbitrary shell script that happens to have been downloaded with the tarball. A shell script can include a Makefile which it saves and make's. Any task which can be performed with one can be performed with the other!
In the end, the go-gnome.com trick is a really easy way to bootstrap yourself into having Gnome running. It's something that anybody can run. And yes, they are putting a lot of trust in the source of the shell script. Just like they would be doing if they downloaded tarballs and compiled them. Two paths to the same place with equivalent risk levels. The difference is, a newbie user might get one of them to work. Unless things have changed drastically, trying to compile Gnome from scratch is a challenge even if you have a lot of Linux experience. Last time I tried it, I ended up chasing down to about third-order dependencies before giving up. I don't think a Linux newbie has a chance in hell of compiling Gnome from scratch.