FreeBSD GNOME Project Site Open For Business

Joe Marcus Clarke writes: "The FreeBSD GNOME project is proud to announce the opening of our project site. This site is devoted to the GNOME desktop and its development on FreeBSD." While the port is an ongoing project, quite a few applications are ready, as are instructions on putting GNOME on your FreeBSD box.

Comments

Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

After reading the problems certain users have had with GNOME I welcome a FreeBSD/GNOME site. Many Linux users don't realise just how based on Linux a few core GNOME components really are.

One good example is the nautilus port. Not only did it take a long time to appear in the ports tree it still has a few problems (especially stability) on my FreeBSD-4.x systems.

I think this site will also benefit Linux users because patches will most probably flow back into GNOME and make it more portable for other systems and expand the user base of many important projects, i.e. nautilus, evolution, etc.

cheers

Re:So what ... big deal.

[Arandir]

Difficulty #1: Gnome is written for Linux. Since FreeBSD doesn't follow the LSB (or what Gnome thinks the LSB should be), there are of course problems. Nautilus simply couldn't build under FreeBSD for the longest time.

Difficulty #2: Gnome is written for Linux. Linuxisms abound in Gnome. To be fair, they abound in KDE as well, thus the existence of the FreeBSD KDE Project. Instead of submitting endless bug reports to Gnome, only to see them closed as "not a problem on my Debian box", I suspect the FGP will do much of this work fixing themselves, then submitting the patches to Gnome.

Difficulty #3: This is still FreeBSD, after all. Someone has to maintain these ports. Since there's quite a few of them (and more being gobbled up by the 'g' prefix every day) it only stands to reason to have a central point of portage.

Re:Portable code.

[aphor]

This makes no sense, in a non sequitur way that pretends to know about software development.

GNOME is an example of what happens when you try to clone Microsoft.

You get bloated, non-portable code.

In actuality, the reason Gnome is bloated is that making modular reusable code isn't easy. How general/compatible do you make the component functions/classes? How autonomous/integrated should you make your application? Which libraries should you depend on, and which should you rewrite? The reason Gnome isn't portable is that in order to simplify the above problem, inadvertently or on purpose, developers tend to forget about other platforms (system dependencies) and concentrate on application dependencies. It's a symptom of just how hard these problems are. We have some lofty goals for our software these days, please pardon them for getting it somewhat wrong while they figure out how to do things.