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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. Translation by AKAImBatman · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
    1. Re:Translation by AKAImBatman · · Score: 5, Funny

      Spatial Nautilus is the only file manager avaiable that works the way I want a file manager to work.

      You must be a GNOME developer. ;-D

      --
      Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
    2. Re:Translation by Senjutsu · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm glad that you like it, but the decision to force it on the entire world was not the best one ever made by the GNOME project.

      Force it on the entire world? Last time I checked, it was still possible to make Nautilus use "Windows File Browser" mode, and the gnome developers hadn't rendered the dozens of other Windows-esque file managers available for X inoperable. They added a choice, which happens to be the default setting, to allow Nautilus to behave in a different way. It's pretty much the only X file manager out there that dares to do something other than clone the Windows file browser, and for that "crime", it's widely castigated by the community.

      God forbid those of us who think the Windows browser model is a horrible User Interface design should have an actual, viable option to choose.

      God forbid that the GNOME developers should do anything other than follow the pack, and make their product indistinguishable from everyone else's.

      God forbid that everyone who likes the browser model should have change an option, or install one of the dozen other managers that cater to their needs. But no, those of us who wanted something different were finally given an option, and that crime is apparently unforgivable.

  2. Again, meh by PunkOfLinux · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  3. Imagine it was a spoon instead of a fork by Timesprout · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  4. This is more like a branch than a fork by GauteL · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. 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"

  6. 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
  7. Gnome 2 is nowhere near complete by dtfinch · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.