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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.
Darn those pesky users for making us stablize things instead of hacking cool new features! I mean, which would you rather have, a foot menu that works or spatial Nautilus?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
If they want to fork, let them. If it becomes any good, it'll be used
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
There is no fork.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
oh wait, there is no spoon
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Havoc is NOT talking about breaking out of GNOME because he doesn't like the current way.
He is talking about forking off development for GNOME 3, because it would be too disruptive to move everyone onto GNOME 3 immediatly.
Basically GNOME 2 would continue as is, with incremental changes, while someone starts hacking on GNOME 3 for a future release. They would diverge quite heavily after a while, but when GNOME 3 has started getting momentum, GNOME 2 can be closed down.
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"
What about a similar but distinct name for the experimental version (ala Fedora from Redhat). Possible names:
(By the way, I have your book on GTK app development... It's very good. Thanks.)
I know this will sound rude. But I feel like saying it anyway. Gnome has very much been focused on becoming more userfriendly in Gnome2 and it has done this by a less-is-more approach. This has, for me, made it a lot more user-unfriendly. The simple file dialog boxes are a very good example of what I mean: They now by default open up half-opened so users will not be confused by the more advanced options in them. But the problem for me is that the advanced options are things I use every time, meaning an extra click or keyboard press every time I need to use them. There is no good reason for them to appear half-open, it is just done to make it simple. The result of this is only extra time spent using them every time to make it easier to use the first time for complete idiots. Something similar is also done with the features to make it more user-friendly: If a feature is to advanced for a beginner, they are simply removed or placed where they are completely unavailable or require a great deal of effort to use. Gnome2 has come user-friendly to the extend where it is almost impossible to use productive on a day to day basis. I seriously hope Gnome3 will be better. Not that I think I will ever use it as a main desktop again, but as I use a lot of Gnome2/GTK2 programs (like I also use KDE programs in my fluxbox) this annoy me very much.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
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
Even though I depend on GNOME libraries for my projects (specifically PyGTK), I think this is a good thing.
The reason why is that having a bleeding-edge version that integrates things like Cairo, xcompmgr, more eye candy, etc will give us who like to have a system with all the eye candy a chance, without having to worry about adding them to GNOME 2.x and possibly disrupting users who want a no-frills desktop. When GNOME 3 becomes stable, it can replace the old version.
But moreover, the Linux desktop is at an inflection point - we're just starting to get the kind of nifty eye candy that other desktops have. GNOME 3 should be a chance to get GNOME ready for the future of the Linux desktop - using Cairo to render the GTK widgets, using Luminosity as the next GNOME window manager, etc.
Sometimes it's healthy to fork off your code and rethink some of the assumptions you made rather than having to deal with the cascading problems that can crop up when you try to muck about and fix those messy hacks we all seem to create.
Forking isn't always bad - sometimes it's necessary to eliminate cruft. If the end result is a better desktop, then that's what should be done.
Seems to me that Havoc wants to create a platform to try out new features that may or may not be accepted by users, and another platform that is more "traditional". When a feature is found to be really useful then they could merge it into their traditional version.
The problem with this, of course, is when the underlying libraries like atk, etc, are altered fundamentally. In that case, things will become a right mess.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Yes, lets all fragment our efforts to kingdom come, then try to compete with proprietary software.
...and then lets wonder why Linux isn't taking off on the desktop.
Lets have 3000 different distros, and no clear leader. Lets make sure every distro has slightly different configuration tools. While we're at it lets force users to compile their source, (including the kernel otherwise their hardware won't work).
Lets have 3 different kernel firewalls, in about as many years.
Lets have 300 desktop managers, none of which quite work or interoperate.
Lets have 3 different office suites, none of which quite translate MS Office stuff quite right.
I'm getting goddamn sick of this, and I'm a developer. I'm also damn tired of defending it. I've had comp sci students roll their eyes at me when I had to recompile my kernel to add support for a printer so we could print data off in Linux. I've also had Astronomy Masters students feel overwhelmed with Linux - avoiding it or dumping it out of frustration early.
Lets decide whether we're doing cool techy geeky play stuff, or whether we want to produce something real and tangible and useable by everyone. Lets make up our minds on any given project what our goals are (or what the goals for our group are). Lets contribute to existing open source instead of starting our own little pet project that does no better than anything that came before it. Lets get a bit of unity back into open source, before it goes the way of the dinosaur!!!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Back in the "old days," I remember the pgcc/gcc split. The old version of gcc was in dire need of an update, but was relied upon by many projects and users. The pgcc effort came online and made remarkable improvements. The old gcc and pgcc coexisted for years. People wanting the fastest compiled code used pgcc. Them finally pgcc was deemed stable enough and became gcc.
Revolutionary work can be done in a fork and I surely wouldn't discourage it. It will make distributions a little more complicated and may cause compatibility issues, but there is a clear benefit here. If the whizbang new stuff is worthwhile, people will use it, patch the bugs, solve the compatibility problems, and use it.
It has: .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.
* 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
* 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.