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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.
Eventually, this new thing will stabilize and become the new "core Gnome project".
Consider it akin to the old 2. numbering in the linux kernel.
That's because the Windows 95 approach to being spacial wasn't very good. On the other hand, MacOS = 9 used a spacial finder, and its absence in OS X is a common complaint amongst the old school Mac crowd. Just because the one implementation you're experienced with sucked doesn't mean the whole concept of a spatial filebrowser is bad.
Read my blog post - it's a reply to _other_ people proposing GNOME 3, I'm saying "_if_ we did a GNOME 3, here is how it would make sense and what it would look like"
Pennington isn't proposing anything. He's merely examining the current discussions on the future of Gnome and exploring possible options. From TFA:
where the comment ends and sig begins
I'd highly recommend you read this article at Ars Technica regarding the Finder and spatialness. It's more than up to Ars' usual high standard, and should give a better idea of what a spatial interface is, and why it can be a good idea, if implemented right.
"Yet Microsoft breaks previous versions of software and APIs with new releases."
Only rarely. The media player that I developed for Windows 98 still runs fine on Windows XP, 7 years later. I have no doubt that it will run on Windows Longhorn as well.
Hell, it's pretty dammed impressive that my code still runs on an OS with a completely different kernel, filesystem, driver model, and just about everything else. By all means, XP is a *very* different OS from 98.
There were good reasons for breaking compatibility with GNOME2. I don't think it's necessary to do it again to advance the OS. Microsoft sure doesn't think so.
(Indeed, it's still not that great, or you'd be seeing a lot more i786, -p3 and -p4 RPMs out there. Not many people use an actual i386 these days, except in the space industry.)
PGCC's optimizations were, IIRC, largely rejected as EGCS's working group didn't like Intel's way of doing things. For similar reasons, again IIRC, a lot of the approaches used in Intel's C compiler aren't used in EGCS/GCC either. Well, I can understand that. It's better to use a good design, if you can. On the other hand, if you're writing something for a processor, it would seem to make sense to allow for the faults of that processor.
I seem to remember a similar argument, when SGI issued a whole load of speed-ups for Apache 1.x - the Apache group rejected them because they were not the way the Apache group wanted Apache to work. SGI caved in, eventually, and stopped maintaining the patches. A royal pain, because I quite liked them.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Not quite. You're thinking of EGCS, which was a project to update GCC 2.7.2 because the EGCS devs didn't like the direction that the FSF were going in with GCC 2.8.
PGCC was a fork of EGCS which was able to emit code optimised for i586-class CPUs. There were versions based on EGCS 1.0.2, 1.0.3 and 1.1. Eventually, the PGCC optimisations got folded into a version of EGCS, and EGCS begat GCC 2.95, which eventually became GCC 3.0.
You're doing it wrong.
Oh, right. The Windows 2000/XP file browser sucks! I have an idea! Let's don't copy the Win2k/XP file browser! Let's copy the Windows 98 file browser instead! That's innovation!
You'd have a good point... if the Windows 95 and 98 browsers had been in any way, shape, or form spatial.
"Spatial" is not equivalent to "opens folders in a new window". Educate yourself.
"My full real name found on my official government documents is "Robert Sanford Havoc Pennington." Everyone calls me Havoc, and always has. I didn't make it up. There isn't a cool story about it, my parents are just weird. It is not a nickname. No, I do not wreak havoc, usually. Yes, I have heard any and all jokes you can think of about this." -- Havoc Pennington's Home Page
I'll leave that to the FUDsters who are better at cowering under the covers instead of embracing good technology.
You mean like the FUDsters that derided the use of BitKeeper?
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
Not all distros do. Pick an old-school, stable distro. Don't go with some flavor-of-the-month. Try something like Slackware, or shit if you want stable, Debian stable is rock solid. Linux gives you the freedom of choice to pick the right distro for you.
Mono is licensed under MIT/X11, GPL, and LGPL..
So? If Microsoft decide to start taking companies such as Novell to court over patented methods in Mono, the MIT/X11 licence is irrelevant. Noone will be able to use Mono without risking litigation.
This is probably the main reason why NTFS is available in the main Linux Kernel tree but isn't in Fedora's version of the Kernel: RedHat don't want to take the risk of patent attacks from Redmond.
This issue is very real, especially when US companies are so damn trigger-happy when it comes to litigation. It's a revenue model.
Your analogy is so obviously flawed and stupid, but I'm sure the zealot crowd will be trying to milk that one for years to come.
On the contrary: surprisingly enough you missed the point.
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
I knew that much. It's not helpful though.
Ubuntu Warty - It did what you say, but not nearly as much as I'm looking for in a menu editor. But I could type applications:// into nautilus and do some other minor editing.
Ubuntu Hoary - Menu editing no longer works. Even applications:// is gone. I don't have more details since a week later nautilus crapped itself and I switched to XFCE (I hate KDE).
CentOS4 (RHEL clone) - The context menu is there, but all the actions you describe are greyed out, even when logged in as root. Can't add or remove launchers or edit properties. applications:// editing also disabled. Maybe a Red Hat decision, but not a big deal since the alternative is broken anyway. A post that I won't bother to search for said that they found the context menu editing to be too buggy.
To sum it up, there was once a sort of minimal menu editing in Gnome 2, but now it appears to be gone. I can't change my menus except using a text editor.
I use Gnome every day, so naturally I'm concerned about its declining quality. I have done some manual editing, but it's a real pain. Gnome seems to pull menu items from all over the place, stored in multiple formats, which is probably part of the reason there's no longer a good user interface for editing them.
But when it was first introduced, THERE WAS NO OPTION. It was added in the next .1 release, because there was so much user outcry, but the gnome people, when they first introduced it, GAVE USERS NO OPTION. (You had to change an undocumented setting by directly editing the registry)
I am trolling