An Interview with Jeff Waugh

An anonymous reader writes "LinuxWorld has published a nice interview with Jeff Waugh, one of the core members of the GNOME community. In the interview Waugh talks about the upcoming GNOME 2.6, his views on software patents and on the involvement of the big vendors in the GNOME development process. Waugh is the current chair of the GNOME release team."

Comments

Speaking of GTK 2.4

[$calar]

Wasn't it supposed to be released on the 2nd?

http://gtk.org/plan/2.4/

New file selector, yum.

I'd love to Gnome out!

[Basehart]

After a few lackluster attempts at installing Gnome on my OSX box I have to say that a nice easy step by step instruction would be most helpful.

For many users, all the untarring, compiling and whatnot is a major headache -- akin to grasping the concept of depth of field in photography for me. Once I finally got it, it was super easy, but getting it in the first place was a big struggle.

I guess there's something about the whole process that I either just don't get, or maybe I think it's a lot harder than it really is.

So anyone know an easy way to get Gnome on an OSX box?

Re:This has to be asked...

[nzkoz]

A fundamental API like you're describing would be the 'lowest common denominator' between the two systems. No KIOSlaves for KDE and no Nautilus integration & panel applets on GNOME. Kinda like AWT from old java, and we all know how much that sucked.

A much saner approach is to ensure that the basic stuff is compatible. Window manager hints, preferences etc. Let application authors write with their preferred toolkit, but ensure it doesn't affect users.

Almost all linux users have both toolkits installed anyway. Yes, I realise some KDE users won't have gnome (Gentoo hackophiles etc.) however if they want to use CoolGnomeApp1.0 they'll just install some librarys and they're away.

Re:Software developer talking about patents

[gaijin99]

I used to be excited about computers and sharing ideas, but when the community dedicated to sharing has become a one note wonder, I find myself dulled by such harping on technicalities rather than technologies.

Ahh, another slashdot poster who doesn't bother reading the article. Had you read the article you would have noticed that out of seven questions, one was about software patents. And it was a damn relivant question, too. Other questions focused on interface design, coder community design, etc.

Software patents are important, that's why people talk about them. If software patents are granted universally it won't do much good to talk about the other things, software engineering breakthroughs, etc, because it will be *ILLEGAL* for us to make any such breakthroughs. But, and again I really do have to recommend reading articles before posting like this, the article was hardly an example of FOSS becoming a "one note wonder".

Re:KDE and Gnome *do* run side-by-side

[theantix]

Bah.

The problem you are complaining about is a problem with Xandros's distribution, not linux. If gnome doesn't run properly in Xandros that just means that they haven't bothered to properly package it. Many distributions have the ability to install GNOME and KDE on the same installation, and applications written for one DE have always run just fine in the other one in every distributions I have tested.

Re:Here is the roadmap

[be-fan]

Qt and the STL are not at odds. They are two different approaches for two different problems. The STL is a general-purpose container library. Its not at all object-oriented, and aggressively static.

Meanwhile, Qt is specialized for GUI programming, and moc and the Qt container library fit that very well. Both allow for much more dynamic code, and in my experience, GUIs are extremely well-suited to dynamism in the language. After all, two of the best GUI languages ever (Smalltalk and Objective C) were of the dynamic/object-oriented variety.

I'm a C++ coder too, and also love the STL. However, I've spent a bit of time doing Qt programming, and really do agree that a more dynamic approach is better suited for GUIs.