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Ask Havoc Pennington

Posted by Roblimo on from the yes-it's-his-real-name dept.

This week's interview victim ... er, guest ... is Havoc Pennington of Debian and Gnome fame. He's one of the world's most stalwart open source developers, and has recently written a book called GTK+/Gnome Application Development. Please post your questions below. Assorted Slashdot moderators, editors, and hangers-on will select 10 - 15 questions and forward them to Havoc via e-mail Tuesday. Per usual, the complete Q&A session will appear Friday.

9 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Should we resurrect OpenDoc? by Paul+Crowley · · Score: 4

    I hear a lot of good things about OpenDoc. They say it was the future of document editing. They say it was the glue that made a collection of small applications into an infinitely flexible document creations system. They say it was a work of brilliance, and, better than that, the Right Thing.

    Should it be reimplemented? Should it be part of Gnome?
    --

    --
    Xenu loves you!
  2. Desktop Standards by Ivo · · Score: 4

    Hello, I like both KDE and Gnome very much, but still something worries me: What if a company wants to release software (e.g. Borland releasing Delphi) for Linux and they want their stuff to interoperate with other applications (like cut and paste or DND)... It looks like they are going to have to implement both KDE and Gnome stuff to operate with all popular applications. Or is there any effort to fully standardise things like application interoperation? (I once submitted this as an Ask Slashdot question for more general discussion, but I think it looked too much KDE/Gnome war provoking..) Greetings, Ivo

  3. The future of GNOME by Skeezix · · Score: 4
    Could you give us a rough timeline of what we can expect to see coming from the GNOME project in the next months, and years? Could you give us an idea of when we can expect to see the 1.0.50 and 2.0.0 releases of GNOME? And what will those releases look like?

    --Jamin Philip Gray
    jamin@DoLinux.org

    --
    Celebrate the finer things in life
  4. KDE / Gnome code merge? by Signal+11 · · Score: 5
    There has been alot of discussion about merging KDE and Gnome together either via a universal toolkit, or by actually merging the two code-bases together.

    What are the technical (and legal?) obstacles that need to be overcome for this to succeed? How does the KDE and Gnome developers feel about such a merger? Is there currently any work being done to further this goal at present (by either camp)?

    --

  5. *Why* is GNOME so slow? by Tet · · Score: 4
    There have been many half hearted explanations for GNOME's poor performance, ranging from Gtk to CORBA to X itself. However, none of those really cut it. Given the responsiveness of standalone Gtk apps, I think Gtk can be ruled out. Orbit is supposedly 3 the fastest CORBA implementation by a factor of 3, even with all the assertions left in. While the X protocol may be somewhat slower than it could be, X is still quite responsive on my old 486.

    I now have an AMD K62-450, and GNOME still feels sluggish, about the same speed as Windows 95 on my P75. That has to be wrong. Yes, GNOME probably does more than W95, including things like network transparency, and the like, but even taking that into account, along with Gtk, CORBA and X itself, you shouldn't be looking at more than, say, reducing performance by half, and that's being pessimistic. In reality, you're looking at GNOME being 3 or 4 *times* slower than it ought to be. Simple question: why?

    --
    "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
  6. Gnome & GnuStep by Le+douanier · · Score: 5


    Is it possible to use Gnome and GnuStep at the same time AND adding the advantages of both application framework, and this for the user point of view (well, when GnuStep will be at this evel at least) and from the developper point of view (being Gnome aware and using some GnuStep facilities).

    Of course in this question Gnome could be replaced by KDE if a KDE developper want to discuss about it.

    --
    "The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
  7. Programming languages by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4
    You are known to be a programmer, and a programmer always has some ideas on languages and tools. What of the currently available languages would be your programming language of choice now? What about two years from now? Why? How would you change it so it becomes the ideal language? What's the worst language you've written something substantial in? How would you change it so it becomes the absolutely most evil language?

    -- just some language freak ;-)

  8. Isn't GNOME lagging behind ?... by Thomas+Miconi · · Score: 4

    (OK, this message may be a little provocative)

    I want to compare current status of Gnome and KDE. So I open two Netscape windows, one on www.kde.org, the other on www.gnome.org, and I read what's going on in Desktopland.

    KDE : "Well, we've just finished reimplementing Visual Studio from scratch (the last beta is shipped with Mandrake 6.1), and we're almost done with Office, but you'll have to wait a little because KWord still flicks every now and then"...

    Gnome : "Well, we've got a woooonderful spreadsheet and a nifty little editor, and we're currently working on getting together every piece of productivity software we find to set up some kind of office suite (boy, they call it a 'meta-project' !) and as for develoment tools, well, Emacs is fine after all, isnt'it ?"

    Admittedly, the last sentence is forged. But the rest is painfully true. So far, in massive projects as well as in little funny tools, KDE has the lead and doesn't seem anything like close to lose it.

    This is even becoming a point in the Oh-So-Holy-War of knowing whether Linux should be called "Gnu/Linux" : The day KDE 2.0 ships (and that seems to be very soon), talking about "KDE/Linux" systems will make much more sense for a significant proportion of Linux users who will spend almost all of their time using KDE tools.

    So the question is :

    When are you going to remember that you're actually making a desktop environment - not an academic project - and that this time, unlike older GNU success-stories, you have a tough competitor that stands exactly in the same niche as you ?

     Emacs took almost ten years to become more or less usable by novice users without spending days and nights trying to figure out how to configure X or Y parameters. I'm afraid Gnome won't have as much time as its glorious predecessor to break through. In ten years, people will already have chosen their side. So far, Gnome quite doesn't look like the winner.

    Thomas Miconi

  9. Inspirations... by Ian+Bicking · · Score: 4
    There are a ton of preceding and current desktop environments: KDE, CDE, GNUStep, Windows, MacOS, Xerox Star, BeOS, QNX/Photon, and a whole bunch of others.

    Are there any ideas from other such environments that you think are really neat? Any ideas that you would like to be part of Gnome, or even plan to try yourself?