Havoc Pennington on GNOME 3's Future

An anonymous reader writes "Havoc Pennington, lead developer of GNOME, wants to fork GNOME 3. 'So the forces of existing userbase, the easiest-to-reach future userbase, cross-platform applications, and funded development efforts are strongly pulling GNOME 2 toward conservatism. I think GNOME 3 should be a fork for that reason.'" This has been a common practice for not only many open source projects, but proprietary systems such as Solaris for major revisions, so it's not as tumultous a change as the word "fork" may imply.

Comments

Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Becuase as it is it seems like GNOME is falling apart. Two years ago GNOME and KDE were neck and neck. Now KDE is getting better all the time and GNOME seems to have just stalled out. Every single time GNOME does something new, they come up with something nobody likes, and instead of listening to any issues their customers bring up they just jam their fingers in their ears and yell "I can't hear you! It isn't poorly designed, it's 'innovative'!"

This smells like BS

[jbolden]

recompile my kernel to add support for a printer so we could print data off in Linux.

Oh really? What kernel flags did you change for a printer driver? Hate to tell you this but there is no printer supporting in any version of the Linux kernel at all. And even if you were just mistaken, nobody has had to recompile a mainstream kernel distribution for things like USB or Firewire for years.

ets have 3 different office suites, none of which quite translate MS Office stuff quite right

MS office format is very complicated, its essentially the internal structures of Word, excel... More importanly it makes use of lots of Windows specific technologies like VBA. There will never be a perfect translation for MSOffice documents. That was the point in its design! Vendor lock in. This has nothing to do with Linux, I don't see SCO, Solaris, AIX, HPUX, VMS, ZOS... or any other operating system doing any better in this regard. Hell Microsoft has trouble getting it right, and they can wholesale add Windows components to another OS;there are numberous problems between MS Office for OSX and for Windows.

If you want to run the core Windows app that uses Windows technologies at the deepest levels perfectly than run windows. The Linux kernel isn't going to do a better job supporting Windows apps than windows will.

Lets contribute to existing open source instead of starting our own little pet project that does no better than anything that came before it.

Oh and Havok is probably the single biggest contributor to Gnome, he's also a project lead for RedHat and founder of Freedesktop.org so this isn't a private project.

The sort of thing you would know if there was a "we" in terms of producing open source software.

Now why do you feel the need to impress people you've never met with lies?

Re:This smells like BS

[jbolden]

I didn't call you a liar on a whim. I called you a liar because you made multiple strong claims which were factually untrue.

I did a configure and compile in a hurry and didn't include LPT support. See my other messages for more details.

Try again. " I've had comp sci students roll their eyes at me when I had to recompile my kernel to add support for a printer". You created a custom kernel that didn't include printer support. You then needed printer support. That's a world of difference than arguing generic desktop users need to recompile a kernel to support a printer. A fair and accurate statement would have been, "generic desktop users who recompile their own kernels missing drivers they need will have to recompile their kernels". But that doesn't work with comp sci students rolling their eyes, now does it (unless they were rolling their eyes at an instructor who can't follow directions)? Because everyone knows garbage in garbage out.

Now what's your explination for the "we" and not knowing who Havoc is?