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Gnome Removed From Slackware
Anonymous Coward writes "After long consideration, Pat Volkerding has removed GNOME from Slackware. Pat mentions in the
-current ChangeLog that GNOME takes a lot of time to package, so this move should allow more time to be spent on the rest of Slackware." From the changelog: "Please do not incorrectly interpret any of this as a slight against GNOME
itself, which (although it does usually need to be fixed and polished beyond
the way it ships from upstream more so than, say, KDE or XFce) is a decent
desktop choice."
I think this happened a while ago (months?), but that Slackware, which is still a major, well thought out distribution, decides to drop GNOME support just like that is major news. Dropline GNOME and other community support projects for Slack exists, so it's not Slackware users will need to part with GNOME. But still, a slap in the face to the GNOME crew. I wonder what they have to say about it.
Anway, i found interesting that Pat mentions XFCE as a "fixed an polished" desktop. It's great, and while i'd hate to see GNOME loose popularity, at this time XFCE 4.2 is a better GNOME than GNOME itself.
Sounds like a way of saying that they aren't terribly happy with the GNOME releases but don't want to start a big fight over it. Read the comments in the ChangeLog; when justifying the decision they hint repeatedly at the problems. I suspect they wanted to say a lot more than they did. ;)
This does open the door for third-parties to tidy up the GNOME releases and provide a drop-in package for the distro though. Perhaps one of them will become strong enough to make it back in the door again.
why on earth is GNOME so RIDICULOUSLY difficult to compile by hand? yes, it's a big and complicated project. so is kde. kde comes in packages: libraries, base, etc.
last time I tried -- admittedly a VERY long time ago -- compiling gnome without the benefit of something like portage was a days-long dependency hunt. dependencies of FINAL releases were often still in CVS only. ick.
if you think that's what computing should be all about, you have WAY too much time on your hands.
Are you building and 'make install'ing, or building .tgz package files? GNOME 'make install's fine. But doesn't obey the DESTDIR envar, so making stand-alone packages is very difficult. (No, setting --prefix= does not work, because that path gets hard coded into various places.)
Which would you rather have?
1) A distribution that includes everything. Of course this means that the team's resources are spread too far, producing an inferior product.
2) A distribution that provides a subset, but is a solid foundation upon which others can reliably add functionality.
I'll take quality over quantity, thank you!
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
i'm glad to see it go. it's always been a big waste of burned disk space when all i want to do is upgrade the latest core packages and recompile everything else that linuxpackages.net doesn't have a binary for.
and while we're on the topic of cutting out unnecessary GNOME fat... GTK developers: please stop depending on GNOME-specific packages!! when i want a cute little program for a slim little purpose to run on my less mainstream enlightenment setup, i *don't* want to install an entire DE that i never use!! please write programs independant of GNOME *and* KDE. both Qt and Gtk are perfectly fine libraries by themselves, without the additional bloat!
Having done the whole "Linux from scratch" thing as a learning experience, I can tell you that building a complete Gnome installation takes at around 3-5x longer than KDE and is much more difficult. This was 4-5 years ago, but the situation has gotten worse from casual observation of the Debian packaging.
One of the biggest differences between KDE and Gnome is that KDE's use of the Qt library dramatically cuts down on dependancies. Gnome requires use of dozens of libraries to match the functionality of Qt and this complicates the build process.
Frankly, from a developer perspective, I don't think Gtk/Gnome libs have quite kept up with Qt in terms of overall quality and I'm not sure how they can be expected to. Qt is heavily supported commercially. There are people being paid full time to add features, improve performance, and write top quality API docs. Gnome expends much effort maintaining its own libraries. It's a shame that KDE and Gnome do not both use Qt. It would eliminate almost all of the compatibility issues, save memory on hybrid desktops, and allow them to compete on things that really matter like UI design. (where there are legitimate arguments on both sides) But, unfortunately, Qt began it's life as a less-than-Free piece of code. As a result, the Gnome folks rightly avoided it. But then they continued their own efforts even after Qt went GPL.. Now there's even a GPL full version for Windows, so the cross-platform argument is totally shot.
FWIW, I'm not trying to bash Gnome, but I do think there is some re-evaluation in order. Competition is good, but wheel re-inventing is usually not.
The "choice" obsessed people would beat them down. They want every OSS effort to be splintered and fragmented, so that I have to install and load two entire desktop environments just to be able to run each other's apps.
The solution is quite simple: don't run the other DEs apps. Or actually pay for an OS - be it Windows, MacOS X, or something else altogether. No one is forcing you to use Linux/*BSD. If it sucks, by all means, stop using it.
The "Linux Desktop" is no some vast concerted effort, it is a hodge podge of whatever people are willing to contribute. As long as people are free to code whatever interests them there will always be splintering. If you don't like that, buy a system where there are enforced standards of what is acceptable.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
As others have pointed out, there's nothing object oriented about your code. And, of course, if that were C++, and pretending that a C++ version of the gtk header exists, you could do this:
// return 0 is implicit from main in C++
void callback(button& b) {
cout << "click\n";
}
int main() {
init();
window my_window(200, 200, "title");
signal_connect(my_window, destroy, main_quit, 0);
button my_button("label");
signal_connect(my_button, click, callback);
container_add(my_window, my_button);
widget_show_all(my_window);
gtk_main();
}
Now look how this C++ version is 10 times easier to understand. Plus it can do many more things. The callback function can be typesafe, for instance, and doesn't need a given signature - it could be a functor, or return a value (which is presumably ignored). This is possible due to templates. C++ is better than C, period.
yada yada yada. If you are developing closed source commercial applications the licensing cost of qt is like a speck of dust in the universe. If you really think these euros is too much, all it tells is that either you have no idea what it costs to have people employed, or that you are a cheap bastard that want first class tool for nothing.