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GNOME 2 to Replace CDE As Solaris Default DE
Gentu writes "OSNews had a quick chat with John Fowler, Sun Software's CTO about Solaris 10, Java, the web services competition and more. In the interview, Fowler reveals the timing in which Gnome2 will become the default desktop environment: Solaris 10, which is expected to have its first beta later in 2003. This is a huge step for Gnome2 in the UNIX world, as it will be replacing CDE for good as the default desktop environment (betas of Gnome 2 for Solaris 8/9 already exist) and becoming a standard part of the large operating environment with millions of installations worldwide. Additionally, Sun is now pushing developers on coding on either GTK+ 2.x or Java (they have in fact revealed plans on creating GTK+ bindings for Java which will make all future Solaris apps look like alike)."
Sun has been babbling about the switch to Gnome from CDE for almost two years now. I use both KDE and Gnome, and both are far more a "desktop" than CDE ever was.
It also confirms my decision to use GTK for GUI development under Linux (I love QT's APIs and structure under KDE, but GTK lets me port to Win32 clients without cost.)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
with CDE theme? :)
*duck*
Granted, this was the first time I read osnews, but didn't the article seem weird to anyone? They hinted at an interview, but instead of quoting the person, they paraphrased the whole interview... Who knows what the Sun guy actually said, and what got interpreted by the interviewer/writer?
Je ne parle pas francais.
Hint Hint... :)
Given how expensive Sun hardware is, I'm not sure how much of a dent this is going to make for most people. Many schools have deals with Sun, as do many corporations...but I don't know of any individuals that use a Sun box themselves.
It would be more interesting to see a major commerical player, such as HP, begin to ship Linux systems with Gnome as the default. Gnome already has a strong geek following...what it needs now is mainstream use, which Sun is not.
I've been using the Gnome2 ( pre-release beta 3, IIRC ) Sun beta on an Ultra 1 in my office for quite some time, and even though the ancient graphics card only supports 8-bit graphics and 1280X1024 resolution, it rocks. hard. you can't deny the power of Motif, but as far as a solid desktop goes, GNOME has it. KDE is excellent as well, but I personally prefer GNOME.
I just hope Red Hat and Sun don't gut each other fighting over the corporate workstation market. I am perfectly content using both platforms, both at home and at work, and would like to see both prosper. Ximian is excellent as well ( actually I'm writing this from a RedHat 7.3 boxen w/ Ximian GNOME ).
I'm drooling at the thought of Solaris 10 right now...
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
Since Netscape 7 is on also Solaris, my guess is an equivalent of Mozilla 1.2.1 (Netscapeized) will come along officially from Sun also.
I speak for myself only.
Not a troll, but does anyone else feel that strategically, TrollTech should have made QT LGPL?
KDE is much more tightly done than GNOME and the overall effect is defnly smoother, kinda like Windows done right!
But if Companies prefer GNOME, then in the long run TrollTech will see reduced demand for its product... or am i wrong?
Of course, there is the counterargument that LGPL would ensure that TrollTech would never get any money out of QT, but i suspect that it would have fetchdd more in the long run, like it is doing for Ximian.... consulting you know!
A crank is a little thing that makes revolutions
The initial write up seemed to suggest that this will be a first for interfacing Java and the GNOME-related libs. This is not so. (In fact, with gcj you're able to write native-binary GNOME apps using Java and the above projects... Admittedly, you're giving up portability but Java is nice, or at least interesting, for many other reasons.) There may be other similar projects out there, that's just what I turned up with a few minutes' search on freshmeat and sourceforge.
Bravo to Sun, though, for making the decision to commit to GNOME. CDE is an ugly pain in the ass, IMHO. Even OpenWindows had some degree of retro charm about it, CDE just looked like what happens if you let Soviet housing block architects design a GUI. Feh!
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
I agree. I was a die-hard KDE user from 1.0-3.0, periodically trying Gnome along the way, but always disappointed by the lack of stability. After trying Gnome again under SuSE 8.0, I finally found it stable enough to use daily (and do so.)
Some people argue about performance and resources, but they're both pretty bloated compared to simple window managers like CDE/Motif.
From a programming perspective, QT/KDE are nicer products, but Gnome is catching up rapidly on the GUI designer front (Glade.) I don't really use IDEs, so I can't comment on KDeveloper vs. Anjuta, but both look to be pretty full-featured on the surface.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
If I remember correctly, the engineers at Sun liked gtk because it used C, which they were used to. Also they felt their customers were more used C too, since Motif is C.
Je ne parle pas francais.
Yes, they're both bloated in comparison to CDE - in fact on any low-end machines I setup with GNU/Linux I've been installing XFCE (a clone of CDE that uses GTK rather than Motif/Lestif.)
"As flies to the wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for sport." - William Shakespeare, King Lear
One refresh it was, at which point I commented. After refreshing again, the previous post showed up.
*sigh* Still waiting for the fluke... *LOL*
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The rumors that tons of freeware software and even Gnome might be integrated into Solaris started floating around even before Solaris 8 release. After Solaris 8 release, Sun has made several official statements promissing to include the Gnome desktop in Solaris 9. Solaris 9 has been released in May and it still does not include the Gnome desktop. The last rumor I have heard, was that Solaris 9 12/02 (which was supposed to be released this month) will include it. However, I haven't heard a confmation of that rumor in a long time and now this. They're asking us to wait until Solaris 10 release, damn you Sun.
And no, an unsupported add-on beta package is not good enough. I want it to be integrated with Solaris and supported by Sun, just like any other Solaris package (this includes fixing bugs and providing patches as part of Solaris patch clusters).
I think a brand spanking new SunBlade can be had for like 999 dollars. I mean, not Walmart-Lindows-cheap, but I wouldn't call that expensive.
Especially considering that I think you can attach a "PC on a PCI card" and run a full blown x86 OS side-by-side (for what I don't know, maybe apps dev?).
on the other hand, I don't know what to make of this constant change of GUIs. many people loathed it when Sun went with CDE from OpenWin, so they had to support both, and now switching to GNOME when finally CDE is getting reasonabbly stable and whatever (and I am actually pretty sure there are a handful of CDE zealots out there that's very vocal) so they will probabbly need to support all three from now on.
I mean... while good news and all, just another facet of the sun indecision "Sol9 for x86, not for x86, cost $$, maybe not, go with one GUI, but wait lets change it over later." AFAIK Java has not suffered too much amid these indecisions and the specs havn't swayed that much (somebody correct me if I am bs-ing), which is thankful for.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
So, are you saying that trolltech would have a lot more customers if they didn't charge any money?
Fascinating...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I hope they join up with the Gtk# team if they want to create Java Gtk+ bindings. Gtk# has a very complete platform for parsing Gtk+'s GLib structure to generate OO bindings which could be easily modified to output Java code.
But then again, Sun probably don't want to acknowledge the existence of C#. It'd be sad if politics got in the way and caused a duplication of effort -- there really isn't any reason why Sun should have to start the project from scratch, it's a very large undertaking.
You can write commercial gnome/gtk applications without paying a penny to anyone. QT license does not allow that (although, it _is_ an open source license)
From the Trolltech FAQ:
For those thinking to develop with the free edition, then just buy a license when they're ready to deploy:
The minimal price for a single platform commercial license is $1240USD. See Trolltech - Pricing Desktop.
The price is very reasonable for the functionality, but I only have so much money to spend on tools, and I'm not willing to plunk down the coin now just in case I need to be able to use my code commercially (i.e. to support a client site.)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
GTK has been ported to windows, and of course native Java compilers exist on windows (perhaps even gcj, don't know). The Java-GTK bindings haven't yet been ported to win32, but that's the only piece that would have to be done in order to write cross-platform native Java/GTK apps. Mac OS/X probably wouldn't be too hard to add either.
I currently use Swing for GUI Java apps because it's cross platform with minimal headaches, but Swing is a slow pig on anything less than a 1GHz machine. Unfortunately I don't think there is anyone working on it right now, but It'd be great to dump Swing for GTK once these bindings get ported.
Will they finally flesh out the woefully inadequate GTK+ documentation?
One of the biggest problems I've found when developin free software is I'll think "Ooo... this toolkit/framework has the features I need" (happened with GTK+ about a year ago) and then it'll take a month to find documentation or guides about it or figure it out from scratch myself.
It's been said heaps before, but developer documentation for Windows stuff comes by the bucketload and there's less different things to document. Of course, the ever-changing nature of free software APIs may have something to do with it...
This is a big boost for Gnome...and it's been needing the boost since KDE is coming on so strong. Unless of course, Sun screws things up...which is entirely possible. My big concern with the dueling desktops is that for uniformity's sake there really should be only one standard desktop.
Actually Swing is quite adequate for desktop applications, and some very complex desktop applications have been written using Swing (such as Netbeans). The main problem with Swing is that if anything, it's *too* complex and tends to run visibly slow on anything less than a 1GHz machine.
I think Swing's sluggishness has been a detriment to Java. Recent model JVM's with JIT compilation are quite fast at executing Java code, but people who use a Swing app on a slow machine will say Java is slow when what they really mean is Swing is slow.
CDE sucks, it is good that a better WM is making it to Solaris, finally. Even though I use KDE, Gnome will be a welcome change for everyone, I think.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
OpenWin was intended to run with DisplayPostscript, and did so very nicely. When the Unix standards wars and POSIX were ongoing, CDE was selected as the standard from various vendors contributions (components of HP's ToolTalk, Motif, etc.)
I've never run into anyone who thought CDE was better than OpenWin, but that's what was selected as the standard, and that's what Sun provided. If they hadn't, they would have been locked out of a lot of important markets.
It's not like there is a "constant change of GUIs" as you indicate. OpenWin was the Sun standard from about 1987 (not sure) until around 1990-1995, when CDE was spec'd. Now they're shifting to Gnome.
Note that all the way through, applications continued to run with the different desktop managers. Or were you under the impression that different versions of apps were running for different desktop managers?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
This is just plain stupid. Why aren't you just compiling gnome or whatever window manager you want directly on your sun box, and then configure the login window to have it as an environment option? I don't see anything smart in running only remote linux applications on a sun. If you do this, then what is the benefit of using a sun workstation?
If Mono, Gtk#, and Gnome2 keep going the way they are going, Sun may be shipping a .NET-based desktop before Microsoft is :-)
Not to start a flame war here, the fact that I personally prefer Gnome to KDE does not mean that the latter sucks (it doesn't) but the Gnome interface is very clean, smooth and consistent.
Oh, I guess his mommy took the computer away for a few months.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Allthough flamebait, I agree with you. We run Solaris at school for Java programming, Matlab, Maple and some other stuff. CDE is default of course. Most people have no idea how to do anything. They can open a terminal and know how to start (x)emacs and compile a Java program. When they get home they start their Windows machine and would never think of trying say Linux.
I have of course changed to Window Maker which is fast, stable and pretty. For what we do there's no need for Gnome, or even a filemanager. I presume many of Sun's customers have the same needs, but Gnome is still way better than CDE.
Ciryon
I agree.. well, not about it being gay, but the fact that its ugly.
After getting pretty used to Linux and a few of its WM's, I bought myself a secondhand SGI Indy (and subsequently an Indigo2) to learn a little Irix - despite the front end being a little basic looking, I found Irix a very cool system. It was easy to use, surprisingly quick even on old hardware, and very functional.
I then persuaded my boss to buy me a new Sun Blade 100 system - it came preloaded with Solaris 8. And what a dissapointment it was. Yes, I was prepared to go without eye candy and all the other toys I was used to, but CDE was just so goddamn ugly and stubborn. In this day and age there is really no excuse for such a dated and unfriendly front end to a system..
Thank god for GNOME is all I can say.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
The cost of QT is per developer, so in order to have their customer's application developers use QT, they'd have to include a QT license with the distribution of Solaris development tools. Not cheap. Not cheap at all.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
If you really edited this mess that many times, surely you could have figured out how to capitalize the text.
I wonder how many people realize your post is a sarcastic parody? (Surely it can't be intended as serious!)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The free version of QT for Win32 is outdated.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
If you were trying to be serious, all I can think to say is "Wah!".
No matter what changes are made to a system, there will always be those who object for various reasons. I followed the link to gconf and a couple others, and it seems to me most of the griping is about features that have a lot of utility.
Personally I'd like to see gconf use XML under the hood, but I haven't looked at the details of the implementation, and the whole intent of gconf is that I shouldn't need to look at the details!
You may know more about the history of Gnome than I, but I know I like what I'm using right now (Gnome 2), regardless of the history that got it here.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I followed a few more of your links to the mailing lists, and I must say it seems to be pretty much unsubstantiated whining.
I'm sitting here in front of a Gnome 2 desktop running on SuSE 8.0. My bottom screen is taken up with a full-width panel, and I've removed all the other panels that were there by default. Took me a whole 15 minutes when I first switched over to Gnome from KDE, without actually reading any manuals.
The only legitimate gripe I found was the complaint about having the desktop be the desktop, instead of a Nautilus-based desktop. Personally I like the utility of a managed desktop, but I could see a few people wanting to just have the toolbar panels on their root window. Maybe they should be looking at less feature-rich environments than Gnome, rather than expecting the 90% population to adjust to their 10% wishlist.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Actually this "Joe User" has been doing software development for over 20 years, with about 10 years of that being GUI/C++/RDBMS/3-tier applications.
I don't know what "philosophy" you thought Gnome was about, but my understanding was they were to create a functional, easy to use, easy to program desktop manager. Looks to me like they succeeded -- very well.
It also seems to me that you have a lot of pet peeves with the way Gnome went/is going, and I haven't seen any postings here supporting that viewpoint. Many of your links refer specifically to problems with Gnome 2 under RedHat. If you tried it under other distros, I think you'd realize it's RedHat and their Blue Curve nonsense that is the root cause of most of your issues, not Gnome 2 itself.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Linux won't be able to ship with Java/Gtk by default until Sun open source the jdk.
.NET environment (from mono), but not a Java environment.
If they don't do anything you will have the weird situation of Red Hat 9.x shipping with a
I know about gcj etc, but to be able to run Apache Tomcat you really need a Sun derived JDK.
-- Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.
Ooh, the button locations in Gnome must be wrong because other apps do it differently. Sorry, but if you blindly click without reading the labels you deserve whatever happens.
I'm not aware of Gnome polluting XFree86. XF86 still seems to work fine with everything, so I don't see where "pollution" comes in. Then again, I haven't looked into it because there are more important issues in my life than whether or not the Gnome team made suggestions that would improve performance of the GUI in any way.
RedHat, Ximian, and Sun direct Gnome? What a shock! Companies with some cash to hire staff are funding an open-source project and expect to have their feature requests addressed first. I'm stunned. Just beyond words at the audacity of these groups for daring to spend money supporting open source!
GConf is not the window's registry. I followed the references someone made to the .gconf directory, and found it is a hierarchy of XML files. Just what I'd have wanted to see. The issue with WinXX registry is that it can't be easily modified or backed up -- GConf is straight XML text files that I can easily save, restore, and mangle to my heart's content.
If the people working on Gnome are a bunch of "fucking retards", how did they manage to produce any software? Maybe it's your attitude that is the problem?
As to "the point" of configurability, maybe you should rewrite your posting again. It seemed to be a long-winded diatribe with a bunch of links to posts about pet-peeve configuration issues. If you were trying to raise some legitimate issue other than configuration, please explain -- it's not clear from your post.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
CDE? Compact? Impossible to break??!!! Are you SURE you're using the same CDE as me?
It 'worked,' in that it did fairly well everything that it did. On the other hand, it ate up gobs of RAM disk space, and CPU compared to the far more functional OpenWindows with a window manager of your choice.
After roughly a decade of being in production across multiple platforms (HP-UX, AIX, Solaris), it's only now relatively bombproof, and is still as lousy to use as always.
I won't argue against your opinion of Gnome (I agree to a certain extent), but CDE was a huge step backwards from the beginning. It was NEVER a good desktop environment, compared to its predecessors, contemporaries, and now its successors.
Death to CDE!
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
There was no debate. You ranted, I tried to make sense of it, you gave up.
Just as well -- I need some sleep. *g*
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
QT costs money for other platforms. GTK is free everywhere.
Qt works properly on other platforms. GTK+ is broken everywhere except X11 (doesn't work, or is very buggy, doesn't look like a native app).
If you are going to recommend an alternative to Qt for cross-platform GUI development, you do yourself a great disservice by suggesting GTK+. Try wxWindows instead - a much better alternative than GTK+, although it does still have issues.
Whenever SUN and GNOME is brought up, there are always someone suggesting they should have used KDE instead. I'm a GNOME-user and I do not want to get into a discussion about quality here, so lets assumed that the (biased) assumption that KDE is better than GNOME is correct.*
The main issue is control. GTK+ and most GNOME-libraries are based on a LGPL-license, while Qt is based on GPL. This is all fine and dandy for free software, and this is certainly not a question of morality. Qt is free software.
For closed source development however things look different. For GTK+/GNOME you can develop closed apps without problems, with Qt/KDE you have to obtain a license from Trolltech. This could be fine for SUN themselves, but:
SUN would not like to be held totally at ransom by Trolltech for all third-party developers. If Trolltech wanted to, they could cease giving out commercial licenses for the SUN Solaris platform at ANY TIME. Do you think any OS-developer would be boneheaded enough to let someone else control the platform? Do you think Microsoft would form the next Windows using Qt?`
The question for SUN is:
"Do we use a platform that is in direct control by another company for third-party development, or do we use a platform that is not?"
This is an easy question to answer wether or not you like KDE or GNOME better.
(*) It might be. I like GNOME better, but this might be my biased opinion. I just wanted to state that this was irrelevant.
Well I'll agree that CDE is pretty stable from patched Solaris 7 onwards. I made the switch from SunOS to Solaris at 2.3, and can tell you horror stories about CDE. Solaris 2.5.0...augh!!!
:-) don't know how to do it. Gnome is extensively and easily configurable. A company can set it up however necessary, and roll that environment onto their jumpstart server.
Compared to gnome, it's tiny, I'll agree. Gnome is far too bloated ALTHOUGH it can be configured to run as fast as CDE on a modern cheapo system (Blade 100/128MB RAM). CDE never could claim that vs. its older (and better) sibling, OpenWindows. For the functionality you get, CDE is a HUGE resource pig. (and that's even given that it's been getting slimmer over the years--early versions were worse)
In another post on this story, I wrote the following:
"...(CDE) has never had the functionality or configurability (or usability!) required. Gnome has the potential to be whatever GUI you need it to be. That is a big win for selling Solaris to specific target markets."
That, I believe, is the key. CDE is just One Ugly Desktop. You can't do much to it, you can't do much with it. Adding an app launcher to the control panel is such an utter pain that I'd guess 95% of the people I know who use Solaris daily (I do contract Sun support, so that's a lot
I won't say Gnome isn't without its faults (I hated 1.x, 2.0 I'm learning to love. Well, like), but the alternative would be to create something entirely different AGAIN, which nobody else had. We don't need that scene.
And for the record, Sun will probably include and support CDE at least into 2005.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
It would be the fifth - Sunview, NeWS, Openwin, CDE, Gnome.
... brilliant innovative technology but Sun kept it proprietary while X was BSD licensed.
People tend to forget Sunview because it wasn't X based. Hell, it was kernel based, but it ran reasonably quickly on a 68020 with 4MB of memory across 10Mb ethernet. Sun took their GUI out of the kernel and into user space a few years before Microsoft took their GUI the other way. Go figure.
The arguments about NeWS have been well rehearsed
Then there was the Openlook vs Motif holy war, during which Scott McNeally was quoted saying Sun would adopt Motif "over my dead body".
As for Gnome, Sun have been putting development effort into Gnome for a couple of years now, working on some of the boring bits. They wouldn't have done this if they didn't intend to use it.
Dunstan
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
Not only that, using plain C spares them a lot of ABI problems that, for instance, g++ has been through recently. They had to use C++ for the Java plugin for Mozilla/Netscape, look what trouble it brought them into.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
How's the performance? Have you tried Sun's packaged GNOME 1.4 on the same box? Why do I ask?... because I tried GNOME 1.4 on an Ultra 1 as well, and it was miserably slow. I really can't imagine that 2.0 would be that much faster, maybe even a tad bit slower.
For the record, I was using an Ultra 1/200E, 512 MB RAM, Creator3D gfx, Solaris 8 7/01 with latest patchset.
CDE/dtwm on the same box was about as zippy as it could possibly be. Vanilla plain, but fast.
This message might not get any replies, being down at the bottom of the stack, but it's worth a shot...
:)
What has CDE been like over the past year? I keep hearing folks talk about how mature/stable/etc it has become. I first used CDE under Solaris 2.6, and later on Solaris 7 and Solaris 8 (revision 07/01). I never had much of a problem with it... it did the job and had a clean look to it. BUT...
...my big beef with it was the blasted memory leaks. All three versions I tried would gobble up insane amounts of ram over about a month's time. Logging out at night solved the problem, but was a bit of a pain on non-networked, always-logged-in boxes. I was used to Openwin as well as SGI's "IndigoMagic" desktop, both of which could run logged-in for months without sucking up more than an extra mb or so of ram. I guess maybe CDE's developers felt the average user would logout after a day or two... or reboot every day like the Wintel PC crowd. I dunno. *shrug*
My long term solution was to ditch CDE on my own box and just use mwm as my wm and have a nicely configured "right-click" root menu. xterm and xwsh are my program launchers, damnit!
HP handed Sun their head on a platter last quarter.
Granted, HP did this by selling PA-RISC and Alpha. These are two dead architectures, with zero native binary compatibility with Itanium.
HP must be pretty happy that there is a sucker born every minute.
Solaris 8 and 9 both come with GNOME in the media kit already. However it is not "officially supported" by Sun.
Stick Men
>- Gconf is a minor issue, it's wrong but you can live with it.
What, precisely, is wrong? I like having a consistent configuration system.
>- Button re-ordering is crap why dont you write one line about it ? compare
>where the OK CANCEL buttons are located in GNOME and look how they are in 99% of
>the other apps.
Why should anyone rehash what has already been discussed to death on the GNOME mailing list?
>- Why don't you waste one line telling us why GNOME needs to pollute XFREE86 ?
Why don't you actually explain what you think is wrong with the libraries that are shared between GNOME and XFree86?
>- Why don't you waste one line about REDHAT, XIMIAN and SUN is directing GNOME
>today ?
Why don't you take a grammar course? Or explain what you think is wrong with the input of commercial companies? Or explain why you discount all the developers who AREN'T from those companies?
>- Why don't you waste one line telling me why you like WINDOWS registry, GConf
>IS windows registry. I can't understand why you want that.
Why don't you actually take the time to learn about a technology before having a knee jerk reaction to it?
>- Have you ever spent 1-2 years dealing with the people that work on GNOME ? If
>not then do so then you realize what bunch of fucking retards they are. Why
>didn't you loose one line about the kick off of Martin Baulig ?
He wasn't thrown out of the project. He was told to revert a major architectural change that he made without consulting the rest of the developers. The thread was much less cordial than it should have been, but he is not free from fault in this regard, having made statements blaming other developers of "destroying the dream of a component based GNOME", and so forth.
Matt
gcj implements most of the Java programming language, but it only has a tiny fraction of the Java libraries.
There is currently only one Java platform implementation, and it is proprietary and comes from Sun; several other companies have licensed it and are shipping modified versions.
CDE is an ugly pain in the ass, IMHO.
CDE is basically what was considered fashionable around the time of Windows 3.1 and OS/2. Also, while the bindings may seem strange to people who have grown up on Windows or WindowMaker or whatever, CDE is actually pretty consistent.
I'm kind of conflicted about CDE/Motif. The actual implementation of Motif sucks badly and is quite buggy. But Motif takes much better advantage of X11 than Gtk+, and technically, CDE does quite a number of things a lot better than Gnome.
Nice troll!
T-ranger writes:
QT costs money for other platforms. GTK is free everywhere.
marm writes:
Qt works properly on other platforms. GTK+ is broken everywhere except X11 (doesn't work, or is very buggy, doesn't look like a native app).
Methinks you misunderstand. For Sun to use QT/KDE in Solaris, they'd have to pay trolltech $BIG$MONEY$. GTK/gnome2 is free software. They could use it for free. And they are. And they're contributing a lot back to the project.
Assuming your statement about 'other platforms' is correct, it doesn't matter. Why? Because Solaris GTK/Gnome2 is going to be on top of X11 anyway.
I'm running the solaris8 gnome beta (gnome1.4) and it works really well. When I have some freetime at work, I'll install the gnome2 beta for solaris on top of it, and see how it does.
Zapman
Very cool. I'm not a big GNOME fan, but if Sun's release version will run nicely on an Ultra 1, then I'll be way more likely to give it a shot. Might even be kinda zippy (heh) on the Ultra 30 (300 MHz) I may soon be getting.
BTW, how's Solaris 9 working out for you on that box? I'm still using 8, which feels a tad slower than 7, but it may just be a placebo effect.
Hahahahah! Oh yeah, I can see it now. GNOME 2, which totally and utterly refuses to work if your $HOME is NFS-mounted, will become the default for Solaris, from Sun, the people who invented NFS.
This should be amazingly funny to watch. I'll have to stock up on popcorn.
08:58 greycat> ~laugh at gnome 208:58 @apt> HAHAHA! AH-HAHA! gnome 2 just cracks me up!
Well, of course gconf *does* use XML under the hood. /etc, just more standardised and friendly to automated parsing (i.e. use in graphical environments).
It's so open that if it breaks, you can go into the database which is essentially a collection of xml files, and edit them by hand. It's just like
Sun would have to pay Trolltech to use QT for anything with has a license which isn't GPL compatible (read: most of what they'd be using a new toolkit for).
One of Sun's biggest concerns (or any OS vendor for that matter) in shipping shared system libraries is that the API/ABI remain backwards compatible. Just as all applications depend on libc remaining backwards compatible, I imagine many future Solaris applications will depend on GNOME/Gtk. Does GNOME 2/Gtk+ 2.x offer this ABI guarantee?
Yes, you could ship many versions of shared libraries each tailored to a specific Gtk version, but you lose the advantage of older applications automatically gaining new features.
Really depressing to hear. I would probably switch school for that. You don't feel like joining us in sweden (Lund) at the other side of the sund? :)
Ciryon
the overall effect is...kinda like Windows done right
:-)
Except many people don't like Windows, and dislike KDE for the copy-Windows approach. It's a matter of flavor -- GNOME diverges more radically from Windows.
I do have to say that this is something like the ultimate slap in the face for the KDE project -- built to replace CDE, its ultimate goal was to do exactly what GNOME is now doing.
Of course, lots of Qt promotion running around...might as well add my own gtk promotion.
GNOME is much more acceptable to adopt as a major standard partly because of the far, far broader application support. The gtk application base has got to be at least five times the Qt application base. There's only a single "killer app" on Linux that's written in Qt -- licq, the best-of-breed Linux ICQ client (which *still* has issues with Windows clients and also has a gtk interface). If you use Linux, you *will* be using gtk at some point -- gimp, xmms, gtk-gnutella, dctc/dc_gui, gkrellm, sodipodi...and if you want a consistent desktop, a gtk-based environment is really the only way to go, since you're going to have to use gtk anyway.
Sun chose long ago, and has been putting plenty of effort into GNOME for a while ago. People acting shocked that they didn't fall behind KDE shouldn't be surprised -- the choice was made a long time ago -- Sun's usability work, donation of code...
Other major points -- the development model is much more appealing to Sun. GNOME has a very open architecture. It's much easier to get something accepted into GNOME than KDE, and GNOME is much less tightly controlled by the GNOME people than KDE is by the KDE people. It's a more open development process. Sun probably decided that it couldn't control the KDE people, so the GNOME approach gave it more freedom to do things the way it wants to.
Next, cross platform support -- as has been mentioned in other posts, in the Solaris world, there are more closed-source app developers who don't want to screw around with GPLing cross platform stuff. The license is much more of an issue on Solaris than it is on Linux.
May we never see th
as a C++ programmer I prefer programming for KDE
Try the excellent gtkmm library. I've used it -- C++ works nicely in the non-KDE world as well, though it took a bit longer to get as nice.
May we never see th
my my, how do you get a +4 for a comment about GTK being broken everywhere cept with X and you have ZERO DETAILS to back that statement up
Because it's the truth. GTK+ 1.4 and 2.0 both work on Win32, but they are both exceptionally buggy - have you tried using the GIMP Windows port? It's not a good experience, and that's not just because the GIMP has a terrible interface anyway. GTK+ apps running on Windows don't look or behave like Windows apps either, they behave like... GTK+ apps. Sticks out like a sore thumb. Second, GTK+ doesn't run on MacOS X at all, not natively, anyway. The X11 version works if you have an X server installed on the Mac, but that just means you're running the X11 version, so my original statement still holds true.
I'm not saying GTK+ is crap, it's just not designed to be cross-platform (assuming you count X11 as a single platform, and I do) and it shows. I was taking issue with the idea that GTK+ is a sensible toolkit to choose if you want cross-platform apps, which the original post in this thread suggested. If you want cross-platform GUI apps, choose Qt or wxWindows - or heck, Java/Swing if you're a masochist, but don't choose GTK+, it would be a dumb choice.
The poor economy forces everyone to think about the performance of applications on 4 year old hardware.
Companies are not replacing computers every two years as they once did.
Also, XML can be parsed quite decently on older hardware so I don't see what your point is in relation to Swing's slowness on new hardware. This is solely a Swing problem. Swing is a very poorly designed Java graphics toolkit that creates 10 times more temporary objects than it should. Sun would be well advised to abandon Swing altogether in favour of a Gtk wrapper.
It's funny.
I'm running KDE on Linux on dual 2.2GHz Pentium 4s with an nVidia card. It's great.
But I've used Sun workstations from (Sun 3/160) 1985-2001 (Ultra2).
When OpenWindows started to ship with XView and then with CDE, I moved over to use plain old twm, then ctwm and finally fvwm. Avoided CDE all these years. It's only now under Linux that I've conceded to using one of these full-featured desktops because it doesn't feel heavy.
Desktop UNIX is going free and Sun will be wise to change to the times.
Sun still rules in the big server arena, but it could leverage that in making a name for itself in the newly emerging low cost UNIX desktop area, as long as it doesn't get caught up misty-eyed pining for the times when people were willing to shell out $20K for a workstation. Enterprise level integration and management of UNIX LANs running StarOffice, Mozilla and Evolution is a potentially huge market playing to Sun's traditional strengths. (NFS, NIS, etc.)
If Sun doesn't, then we'll have to look to other players that may not be quite as well positioned from some perspectives: HP, IBM, Red Hat, Dell...
"Provided by the management for your protection."
You can write commercial Qt/X11 applications as long as they're GPLed.
Don't mix up commercial and closed source.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
I wonder if this will extend to the next version of Trusted Solaris. It would be very nice to get rid of CDE there, too.
>I'd say the problem with GConf is that it's a poor reimplementation of a system
... and limited. ... and lacking in a consistent method for documenting what options are available or what valid values exist.
... with no method for locking configuration options so the users COULDN'T override. ... without extensibility such that a network server could be used for storing configuration, either on a network wide or user basis.
... which is also true of gconf.
... and simplicity sometimes means inflexible.
... which is also true of gconf, as by default it stores each applications settings in seperate files.
... which doesn't allow for notification of configuration changes to running applications.
>that already existed.
>
>X11 always has had a consistant, centralised, configuration system, the
>Xresources mechanism. This had a number of very useful features:
>* It was simple
>* Sysadmins could easily set central defaults which could be easily overridden
>by users wanting to customise their own systems
>* You could fine tune settings so that some would apply to all apps that
>recognised the same keyword, some to specific combinations of controls and
>apps, and some to specific apps, as you, the user, prefered.
>* It was a genuinely simple configuration file format, little more than
>keyword/value pairs.
There is no allowance for more complex datatypes. There is no allowance for grouping application specific resources into their own files. Et cetera, ad nauseum.
>Pretty much impossible to foul up in such a way that a minor configuration
>issue would prevent all applications that use it from starting up.
>* The system is implemented as part of the basic X11 libraries, meaning no
>daemons running.
>GConf is nothing like the above. It's a bizarre reimplementation of the Windows
>Registry that assumes that the only fault with the registry is that it's one
>"proprietry" file.
Aside from being a unified configuration system, how is it a reimplementation of the Windows registry?
And have you bothered to read ANY of the documentation on it? Even the earliest proposals for GConf listed more drawbacks than that; e.g. lack of provision for sitewide administration and lack of documentation for registry keys.
>It fouls up easily - it took several successive installations of Galeon before
>that app started to work on my machine, for instance, because GConf had some
>problem with permissions on some centralised configuration file, and there was
>no obvious fix to this.
A problem with one specific application, with no indication of what was really wrong, does not prove that it fouls up easily.
>The files it uses are XML,
Correction: the files for the current default backend are XML.
>which is an unnecessarily complex format for storing app settings for most
>applications
Keyword here is *most*. The benefit of a unified configuration backend are lost when applications have to work around its shortcomings.
>and really offers little or no advantage over keyword/value pairs, and it's
>redundant!
It's also self-documenting, and can take advantage of prexisting parsers.
>Someone one day will explain a sane reason for GConf, but right now it looks
>like another symptom of the major complaint I have against Gnome - the
>pointless removal of a perfectly reasonable Unix-way of doing things in favour
>of a sub-optimal reimplementation of a
>not-terribly-good-idea-in-the-first-place that happens to be part of the
>World's Favourate Operating System.
Come up with a way to implement the functionality of GConf with Xresource files, and that sentiment might almost make sense.
Matt
I despise CDE. Not for its obtuse configuration scheme, but rather for the fact that it has so many security holes. ToolTalk especially is the bane of my existence. Take a look at what CERT has to say about CDE. Whoever coded CDE should be fired.
I don't know what the 'other stuff' is. but Java, Matlab, and Maple are all available for Linux.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
Hmm. With the optional graphics libraries from Sun, I'm finding Gnome 2.0B3 surprisingly fast. Faster than any Gnome environment on Linux has been. However, it required having those libraries in place, the Beta3 installed (2 was slower, 1 was slooooooooowwwww!), and home directories on a local or fast network drive.
My problem with CDE is that it's been dated, inflexible, and restricted in its functionality since the day it was released. It was also horribly bloated at first, compared to OpenWin/olwm.
I certainly wouldn't call you a troll (did you get modded as one? Goofballs!), but I also think that you're being rather confrontational about Gnome. If you have a spare Sun box (No guarantees about Solaris/X86), put Solaris 9 on it with the Beta3 desktop, mlib libraries, and make sure your home directory isn't across a slow link. You might be surprised at where it's got to now.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
There's only a single "killer app" on Linux that's written in Qt -- licq, the best-of-breed Linux ICQ client
Discounting of course the whole of KOffice, the only Linux office suite that's nice to use. Or Konqueror, the web browser, file manager and universal viewer that's actually good to use and does what it says on the tin. Or KPPP, the only friendly GUI way of getting online if you're on dialup. Or Quanta, the nicest HTML editor. Or Kate, the all-round best GUI text editor. Or KDevelop, the best IDE by miles. Or Scribus, the only DTP program on Linux worth a damn. Or Rosegarden-4 or MusE, the only halfway-usable music sequencers on Linux. Or Karbon14, now part of KOffice, not quite there yet but a vector drawing program like Sodipodi that, unlike Sodipodi, doesn't drive you barking mad.
GTK+ has more applications in number, I agree, although not anything like the 5:1 ratio you think, and few of them are large and complex. Only two of the apps you gave as examples, the GIMP and Sodipodi, could really be described as large and complex, and both of them have a reputation for having a terrible user interface. The rest of the apps you gave are all fairly small and limited in scope - a music player, a couple of p2p apps, a system monitor. Personally I think that says a lot about GTK+'s suitability for writing large applications.
Compare that with Qt, which has Scribus, Rosegarden-4, MusE, KDevelop and Karbon14 as large and complex killer apps, all of which have quite decent user interfaces, and all of which have smaller development teams than the GIMP or Sodipodi. Heck, Scribus was written almost entirely by one person! You'll note also that there aren't too many specialist commercial applications being written in GTK+ - where are the medical imaging apps or the geological survey apps, to pick two that TrollTech shows off as success stories? Or of course there's Opera, or the HancomOffice stuff. Or all the PDA stuff for the Zaurus. If the commercial licensing was really a problem for Qt, don't you think these would have been written in GTK+ or wxWindows instead?
There's this persistent myth put about by some people that no-one is writing apps with Qt, and it simply isn't true. You're just choosing not to look at them.
If you use Linux, you *will* be using gtk at some point
Not really. The only GTK+ apps I keep around these days are the GIMP and Sodipodi and they are such pigs to use I often find myself booting a VMware Win2k session to use Photoshop and Illustrator instead, even for quite small tasks. The only non-Qt app I find I use regularly is OpenOffice.org, and that's only because it's the only thing that will reliably open MS Office files - if I'm starting a new document I prefer KWord or KSpread, they play nicely with the rest of my desktop, are lighter on my system, and are easier to use.
Sun probably decided that it couldn't control the KDE people, so the GNOME approach gave it more freedom to do things the way it wants to.
You're almost certainly right on this point. ;)
Of course, freedom for Sun isn't necessarily a good thing for the end user - or the volunteer developer. Witness all the moaning about the direction GNOME 2.x is headed from... end users and volunteer developers.
I see no read more on the article. I go to the comments section and hit read more, and see the same article.
I agree with the original poster, what type of "interview" is this?
- sigs are for wimps.
Swing is not a window manager which is the first thing they need.
Plus they said in the article to write your apps in Java (they'll provided the look & feel) or GNOME, so I don't think it's a statement on Sun admitting anything on Swing.
Why waste money with yet another desktop environment when there's a free one? That's the thinking that probably went into this.
- sigs are for wimps.
they have in fact revealed plans on creating GTK+ bindings for Java which will make all future Solaris apps look like alike
All future apps? Gentu has been smoking crack!
Unless there's a gun pointed to the head of Solaris developers, there's nothing stopping them from using Motif or vanilla X11. Most commercial UNIX developers have never used GNOME. Sun cannot seriously think that people will jump on the GNOME bandwagon just because they change a desktop. Is Adobe going to release Gramemaker and Rational to release Gleargase just because Sun thinks it's a cool idea? Hah!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
>Locking configuration options so users can't change them? Hardly a great
>advantage though a moderately competent sysdamin can indeed do that.
Since Xresource files are stuck in one big file instead of seperated out, and the entries in the users directory override system default, how do you remove the ability to edit SPECIFIC settings instead of all of them?
>As for network wide configurations: you allegation is nonsense. Configuration
>files are stored in the app-defaults directory, which could easily be a network
>share or just something updated through existing mechanisms such as NIS.
This doesn't work so well when dealing with, e.g. remote users on an untrusted network. Yes, there are ways of kludging around this, but I'd much rather use something like LDAP or ACAP.
>Not that I've seen, or rather, applications have to go out of their way to
>support such things, looking for several different settings and deciding which
>to use.
Um, settings are stored in a very easy to follow tree-structured namespace. I don't call:
gconf_client_get_string (client, "/gnome/foo/bar")
going out of their way. If there is a failure here its in policy, not in the technology.
>It's obvious from the above comments that the decision was made to replicate >the registry but attempt to address its, perceived, flaws, and it's obvious
>that at no point did the authors consider that Unix already had an existing
>configuration system.
If you insist on ignoring the benefits, sure its obvious.
>Do you believe, incidentally, that GConf actually fixes the documentation
>issues with registry keys, or that it simply hopes that by starting afresh with
>a new set of applications, the far sighted intelligent programmers who write
>them will make sure those damned keys are documented?
Whether the documentation is done is again a policy issue, not a design issue. My point is that it provides a mechanism for storing and retrieving documentation on keys, with proper internationalization support nonetheless.
>That's true of XML too. Have you ever written an XML parser, or tried to use a
>library that provides XML parsing?
No on writing one (why would I when there are more than a few available) and yes on two.
>And, to be honest, the shortcoming I was thinking of with keyword/value files
>concerned non-ascii datatypes, a problem XML has too.
What kind of non-ascii data do you expect desktop applications to need for configuration again?
>In all honesty though, you're claiming something as a solution to a problem
>that isn't. GConf still imposes its own percieved ideas about how the
>data should be structured. And it does it badly.
What, in particular, does it do badly?
>Oh come on! We're not comparing it to obscure binary files with indexes and
>other cruft. We're comparing it to keyword/value files, like Xdefaults, like
>.INI files, like what just about every programmer has been using since 1985.
Not every programming practice from the 80s is necessarily a good choice.
>Are you seriously suggesting that suddenly these have become unreadable, that
>there's no base of easy to use parsing code for these any more? Half the time
>it isn't even worth finding a generic routine to parse these things.
The value comes when you want to store something more complex than an atomic datatype (e.g. a list or a tree structure).
>Are you a programmer or a Buzzword Engineer? Do you have the slightest clue how
>parsable these different types of file are? Do you know what a pain in the arse
>XML parsing is, even given a library that supposedly does some of the work for
>you?
I've only done some simple parsing, but its not all that difficult in my experience, so long as your needs are simple. Which is the case with GConf.
>Ok, WHAT'S the serious functionality that GConf gives that Xresource files
>under Unix haven't got? So far, you've come up with sysadmins being able to
>easily override user preferences, something most of us would suggest is an
>extreme reason to completely rewrite a configuration system, replacing it with
>a bloated alternative that eschews standardisation and code reuse for buzzword
>compliance and bloat - I'm not even convinced it's not already in the Xresource
>system.
Just to sum them up again
- an arbitrary number of configuration sources
- pluggable backends to allow different types of sources
- administrator control of what options are changable
- live notification of changes to running applications
- heirarchical namespace
- api for getting and SETTING keys
- support for documenting keys
Et cetera blah blah and so on and yadda yadda...
Matt
I know this isn't the point that the submitter chose to focus on, but I have to point out the anti-IBM spin that the OSNews author let through or inserted:
The omission of AIX on POWER4 is completely bogus. IBM is Sun's only real competition right now, and Big Blue's offerings outperform Solaris on Sparc at a fraction of the cost.
I'm sorry, but who really thinks that it's a bad thing that IBM is paying a large number of developers to contribute GPL'ed code to the Linux kernel? IBM's work has had a lot to do with the high-end progress that we've seen in 2.4 and will see in 2.6. They're not steering the kernel and they're not subverting the process, they're just submitting their patches like anyone else could. They're adding their efforts to the efforts of others in the community, and everyone is benefiting from the results.
Sun, on the other hand, is willing to make the massive contribution of writing some drivers, if no one else will do it form them. Otherwise, they're satisfied to offer Linux, only as a low-end player, and do their darndest to make sure it stays that way.
It's false that IBM is "not evolving AIX" anymore -- their last release was less than 2 months ago. But their actions clearly show that they want to help Linux grow into the role that AIX currently fills (to be clear, that would be running on pSeries machines to outperform Solaris on Sparc). Obviously, Sun has a problem with that, but why should anybody else?
You'll notice that when you start KDE apps under Gnome, various KDE daemons are started if they aren't running. If you run Gnome apps from KDE, various Gnome daemons get started. I expect tooltalkd or some such will be started to deal with the CDE applications in the same way.
Did anyone ever actually use tooltalk with CDE? I never saw anything except recompiled Motif applications...
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I thought NeWS was the DisplayPostscript equivalent to an X-11 server. *shrug* Maybe my memory is fuzzy...
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
- The Qt toolkit is available under two different licenses: The Professional and Enterprise Editions for commercial use on all platforms, and the Free Edition for developing free/open source software for the X11 platform.
In other words, with Qt you can have free OR cross-platform, but not both. If you want free AND cross-platform, you have options like wxWindows, Perl/Tk, and Java.Find free books.
GNOME 2 [...] utterly refuses to work if your $HOME is NFS-mounted
No, it refuses to work if your $HOME doesn't support locking (i.e. you use a really old, broken version of NFS). Believe you me, Sun, who invented NFS, has an implementation of NFS that supports locking just fine. They won't have a problem.
Of course, I know from experience that NFS has problems with lots of locks held simultaneously, which may be an issue unless these locks are only held briefly. But surely Sun (who invented NFS) is aware of that, and has looked at the issue. They're not usually that stupid.
Even for the sake of "prettyness", as you put it in your other reply, why would you waste a Sun workstation on remote X clients? You can view remote X clients on any sort of machine, as long as it is running X (a cheap Pentium can do this for you). Even if your 2000+ client network is all remote X clients (like some moron I used to work for who used Windows Terminal Server for everything the entire company did, until it kept crashing sessions and randomly killing sessions while Windows 2000 Advanced Server kept having fits because Windows Terminal Server was never meant to be a full-time remote serving environment), why are you using expensive, powerful Sun stations as simply dumb terminals to run i386 Linux applications? You should just compile/install Gnome on your Sun Machine and run your programs locally. Of course, this is all for nothing if you are just some random employee and simply want to run Linux apps on your Sun machine remotely.
Hmmm... You say that the elections for the GNOME board have been dominated by Sun, Ximian and RedHat. This is correct to some extent, although this should not be surprising if you take into account how much these companies have contributed to GNOME. But then you say that the "community of free volunteers has been basically sqashed" and the board is "controlled by major corporations." Did you forget that Ximian is a small company (not a major corporation) that was founded by several of the volunteers who started the GNOME project? They have decided to create a company because they have chosen this way of making a living. But they started as free volunteers like you and me (although I do not know who you are, but I hope that you are an active contributor and not just someone who complains about something without having participated to it).
You could object that some of these companies are trying to promote their own interests in the GNOME board and are going against the community of volunteers. As far as I know, this is definitely not the case. I am generally happy with the decisions taken by the GNOME board and I am not associated with any of these companies. Also, I would like to mention that there is no "community of free volunteers" going against the corporate developers. There is only a community of GNOME developers (or several communities, if you take into account the applications such as the GIMP, Sodipodi and so on) and this community includes some people who are paid for working on these programs as well as many volunteers. And in almost every case, everybody is happy with that.
-Raphaël
1. It is a myth that Java is a cross platform technology. It works mostly on win32, with serious bugs on macos9, with some bugs on macosx, stable only on a server side on most of Unix and Linux/x86 platforms. It doesn't work well on Linux/non-x86 platforms or doesn't work at all. 2. Java will never be fast. CPU becomes faster and instead of AWK we have SWING, later we'll have SOAP based UI, later SOAP over EJB (or EJB over SOAP?). Besides, Java is an interpreter - it's never been design to be fast. 3. Java is not RAD. You have to compile your code => your development process is slow. 4. Java will never become a desktop environment. Remember Netscape? They have tried to rewrite it on java. What's happened? The project is failed. And even ownership of Sun, Java inventr, did not help. Desktop is much more complicated then just a web browser. 5. Java is an interpreter of compiled code - that the most insane invention I've ever met
Less is more !
>Wrappers with -resource parameters? Immediate kludge I can think of, but it'd
>work. Again I question the necessity for doing this, but it's certainly an
>option for the BOFHs assuming they're not interested in a simple change to the
>source code or patching XLib.
Yeah, requiring non-standard X libraries is a grand solution. You've convinced me.
Locking down configuration options has a lot of uses, particular in lab or kiosk configurations.
>X's resources allow you to define any default, be it for an application, a
>widget, an application's widget, a widget in a widget, or anything else. Like
>this:
And its still a matter of policy, not the underlying implementation.
>Personally I can only think of the type of thing you'd find in themes, sounds,
>images, that kind of thing. XML cannot do those either.
Why on god's green earth would you store the contents of an image or a soundfile inside your configuration system?
>What exactly were you trying to represent in a configuration file for an
>application that required XML, couldn't be done easily with simple
>keyword/value pairs, and was within the scope of XML?
I gave two examples. You commented on them later. (Just to avoid having to deal with it again, tree structures could be used for something like bookmarks as well. No other examples come to mind right now, but to say there aren't uses is short-sighted.)
>The onus here is on you: You're saying that ASCII keyword/value files must be
>replaced by XML, and must be by a complicated system that maintains its own
>databases, runs over network connections using additional protocols, and must
>be incompatable with all that came before. What's your justification?
Actually, I said nothing of the sort. What format the backend uses is mostly inconsequential. The reasoning for the XML backend, to my recollection is primarly because people distrust binary formats, and because the parsers are already part of the platform and are used extensively through the rest of the desktop.
If you really wanted to you could write a GConf implementation that uses the XResource files for storing the settings.
As for the rest of it - yes, I think the benefits of GConf outweigh the "drawback" of being able to run on a network (using standard protocols, nonetheless) and migrating to the system (already done).
>I refer you to the comments I made earlier. GConf is unnecessarily complex,
It's honestly not that complex. Have you actually LOOKED at it?
>a switch over to an unnecessarily resource intensive method of storing
>configuration files,
I tend to consider sacrificing robustness to optimize a corner case as irretrivably stupid. What applications, precisely, do you know of that spend anything but a trivial amount of time reading their configuration, even using GConf? (Keep in mind that one of the functions of gconfd is to cache settings so each application doesn't have to reread them.)
>solving non-issues through redundant technologies and whose justifications are
>limited, in large part, to the desire to solve problems that cannot be solved
>technologically.
Actually it solves the problems it needs to quite nicely; i.e. providing a consistent mechanism for configuration data to be stored in a process transparent manner.
>It adds nothing to GNOME, and adds further administrative hell to those who
>have to maintain GNOME desktops.
Funny, but I think it's easier to administer than the older INI style files.
>No, but not every programming practice from the 1980's is bad either, and what
>you appear to be saying is that you feel fully justified in ditching a
>technology simply because it dates back that far.
No, I was saying that "people have been doing it that way since XXXX" isn't a justification. Nothing more, nothing less.
>I believe the onus is on the GConf people to demonstrate that the practice of
>using simple, easily edited, easily understood, easily parsed, text files to
>store configuration information is a bad one.
The core of GConf has nothing to do with how the data is actually stored. You keep ignoring this.
>Ok. Not exactly a reason for junking what we had already and building some
>daemon-laden kludge, but it may constitute an advantage.
The main reason for a daemon is to provide caching and notification. You've yet to explain how you would do this using only XResources.
>...which under Xresources you can do both via the command line (editres) and
>via library calls (XtSetValues, XtVaSetValues, etc)
That might be pertinent if GTK+ were based on XT, which it isn't. Even if it were, neither of these happens instantly and automatically when settings are changed.
>Needless to say, there is an API for getting keys. Setting keys is somewhat
>less in need of an API as such, as appending a line to a plain text file has
>never required anything dramatic.
And of course the only manipulation of settings that ever happens is adding a new one. Right.
>Which is a policy issue not a technological issue. Take a look in your
>{XLIB}/app-defaults/ directory, and if you can find a machine with Netscape 4.7
>on it, take a look at the Netscape.ad file in its */lib/netscape/ directory,
>and there's nothing really to stop someone going in more detail on any of
>these.
Comments in a file listing defaults does not equate to usable documentation in a desktop environment. Perhaps a standardized format could be adopted
to allow for easy retrieval of the information, and perhaps that format could have provisions for internationalization. But don't pretend that it is currently the same thing.
>None of the above shows good reason for reinventing the wheel. At best, in some
>cases, there was some justification for extending XLib.
And I'm sure the X Consortium would be delighted to standardize those changes right away, and every OS vendor will immediately package up a new binary
for their systems (including ones for releases done in the past five years, since we wouldn't want to count them out). Yep.
>GConf cannot be fixed. It's an ugly multimegabyte hack which owes more to
>buzzword compliance than it does to solving problems.
Um, multi-megabyte? Are you going solely by the size of the unpacked archive or something? You do realize that the majority of that space is translated strings, example code, and documentation, right? If you look at the actual source code, the latest release has about 14k LOC shared, 7.1k for the backends (currently xml and bdb), 1.7k for the daemon, and 2.2k for the front end tool.
The compiled binaries take all of 338k on my system, including the libraries, daemon, and command line tools. When you come up with your proposal to get the same functionality from XResources with less code, maybe I'll take you seriously.
>XML shouldn't be used for configuration files except in a very rare set of
>circumstances, because it's an unnecessarily complex format for storing very
>simple data that usually comprises of little more than a set of discrete
>values.
I don't necessarily disagree. I've stated the reasons for the choice of XML to the best of my recollection already.
>Programs shouldn't have to communicate with daemons to find out what colour to
>paint a widget.
As I already said, the daemon allows for caching and propogation. How do you propose this be implemented otherwise?
>Programs shouldn't fail because a third party configuration system hasn't set
>itself up correctly.
Yeah, just like programs shouldn't fail because a third party windowing system hasn't set itself up correctly. Or a third party networking system hasn't set itself up correctly. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
>Files that are shared across a network should be accessed on conventional file
>sharing systems unless there's a very good reason not to.
These aren't "files", they're settings. They may be in files, they may be in a database, they may be written on paper and typed in by a trained monkey when you request them.
>If you have the source code to a system, it makes sense to extend it if you can
>to support additional features you want, rather than throw the entire thing out
>and start afresh.
Well, just as soon as you get the source code to every platform that runs Gnome for the project, that might be compelling argument.
>There was never any reason to junk Xresources. A configuration system shouldn't
>be as complex and bloated as GConf. It's just applications trying to get their
>settings for crying out loud. It's not rocket science.
I've yet to see any compelling argument from you to convince me that just over 300k of binaries and libraries constitutes "bloat" or that an API that consists of a bunch of get and set functions is complex. Sorry. But I will send you home with a years supply of Spam and a copy of the home game.
Matt