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

Gnome 2 is nowhere near complete

[dtfinch]

It has:
* No menu editor.
* Hard coded un-overridable mime-sniffing that gets lots of things wrong (because it's foolish to even try to anticipate every single file format and code to handle them all) and then forces its will on the user (won't open some of my text files in gedit for "security" reasons).
* A file browser that defeats all that paranoid mime-sniffing "security" by hiding extensions .desktop extensions (like Windows does with .lnk files, but without the arrow telling you it's a shortcut) allowing them to spoof regular documents with icons and everything.
* Menus that scroll like win95 when very full. A menu editor and/or overflowing into columns would help a lot.
* And a continually decreasing level of configurability.

I suppose aside from that it's very good. It's the desktop environment I'm using now, and the one that I keep coming back too after repeatedly trying to dump it in favor of the alternatives.