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Havoc Pennington on GNOME 3's Future

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the this-way-or-that-way dept.

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.

9 of 309 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Don't call it Gnome 3... by Chirs · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:Don't call it Gnome 3... by lazy_arabica · · Score: 3, Informative
    The name 'Gnome 3' is reserved for the core Gnome product. If you're going to fork the core product and possibly make an incompatable branch, please give it another name.
    Uh, are you sure you understand what we're talking about ? This developer want to fork Gnome 2 into a new development branch that will eventually become Gnome 3. He's not talking about creating a new and independant project....
  3. Re:Translation by Slack3r78 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Not always true by Havoc+Pennington · · Score: 5, Informative

    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"

  5. Sensationalism (TFA Updated) by bottlerocket · · Score: 5, Informative

    Pennington isn't proposing anything. He's merely examining the current discussions on the future of Gnome and exploring possible options. From TFA:

    Ah geez, again I foolishly fail to remember that phrasing things a certain way results in Slashdot articles which inevitably have misleading headlines and summaries. For the record, my point is not that we should do a GNOME 3 (especially right now), and it definitely isn't that I personally intend to do a GNOME 3. It's that if someone did a GNOME 3, the right way to do it is to create a fairly long-lived branch (aka fork) of the project while continuing the GNOME 2.x series on a 6-month cycle in the meantime. I'm responding to other people's blogs here, rather than proposing something.
    --
    where the comment ends and sig begins
  6. Re:Translation by Slack3r78 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  7. Re:Useful Precedent: PGCC -- GCC by Michael+Hunt · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
  8. Re:Novell should get involved in the "fork" by stor · · Score: 3, Informative

    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"
  9. Re:Novell should get involved in the "fork" by stor · · Score: 3, Informative

    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"