I'm not sure I'd trust Ximian to auto-update my system - while they try pretty hard, I've had just too many dependancy conflicts updating RPMS from them to feel really warm and fuzzy about having it happen automatically.
The automatic updating is totally optional, and it will never "force" an update, so dependency problems can be resolved by the user.
Unless redcarpetd has the ability to prevent upgrades on selected packages I wouldn't trust it.
It does, through an.rcexclude file. It's not ideal (yet), but it's a start.
And until the packages get vetted better for conflicts I would be careful.
If you see dependency problems in our packages, it's almost certainly a bug. File it: http://bugzilla.ximian.com.
It's trivial to turn off listening to the remote port in rcd. So if you want to be totally safe, just shut it off, like any other service. You can still use it locally, and still have it pull down updates from the server (automatically, even!)
Yeah, the look is pretty much the same. Probably the coolest is Pango, which is the text layout engine behind GTK+ 2.0. There are some older screenshots at pango.org.
Most of the advantage, though, is at the API level.
In another chapter from the can-dish-it-out-but-can't-take-it-dept., I notice that the GNOME developers, who built their position in large part by an endless stream of anti-KDE FUD are now considering disabling reader comments in Gnotices. Partly because of crapflooders, mostly because they're opposed to allowing any negative messages to be expressed.
In my experience, the anti-KDE FUD is rarely from the developers, but from a distressingly very vocal minority. I don't doubt that there may have been a stong anti-KDE feeling in the past, but I am hard pressed to try to find it these days. And KDE isn't immune to it either... their loudmouth trolls are just as bad as GNOME's.
As for the comments, if you read the whole thread, people have been spoofing as Miguel, Havoc, and others in the comments to the point where they are getting emails asking, "why would you say that?" I think that some people are against allowing negative opinions, but I would hardly classify that as an official GNOME position or even having consensus. The GNOME developers are pretty reasonable people and will listen (or at least certainly not censor) criticism of their work that is presented in a coherent and intelligent manner. The consensus seems to be to disable comments until someone volunteers to write a nice registration system.
The email to which you refer (From Alan Cox):
That isnt the problem. In fact if gnotices fell down irrepairably it would be
a major plus point for the gnome project. Gnotices consists of nothing but
libel, defamation and actionable hate speech.
could not be more true. Why should GNOME allow such garbage to be posted to their site? We're talking about lies, spoofing, and trolling, not censoring sensible criticisms and reasonable technical arguments. You may say there is a fine line, but in that case, I recommend you read -all- of the Slashdot comments for any story and then read all of them on Gnotices or the Dot. Eliminating the anonymous posting and requiring registration with an email address would cut down on the crap a great deal, and just because these sites look like Slashdot doesn't mean that you or I have any right to post our comments on them; please direct me to any newspaper which prints every letter to the editor they receive unedited. -----
I just used go-gnome last night to uprade to Ximian from Helix. Very smooth, very slick. The biggest nit I have to pick with the installation was that I was limited to Ximian's "categories." I could have a minimal install, an install with productivity apps, an install w/productivity and Internet apps, or a full install including the "development files." (Did I leave any choices out?) There was no obvious way to do a "Custom" install, a la $BIG_MICROSOFT_PACKAGE. Since I wanted the "Internet" apps, I got all the "Productivity" apps that I don't use, and will have to uninstall them tonight.
We found that most of our users wanted only to install either the default set they were given or to install everything with the old installer. The reason for the change is Red Carpet, because it is now much easier to install new software and remove software you no longer want from you system. The difference in the package sets themselves is pretty small (on the order of 30 megs or so) and the rather short development cycle of the installer application made us decide that it would be more worthwile to go with a few sets of packages rather than doing package-level maintenance.
Myself personally, I usually just pick whatever defaults are given to me by installer applications (Linux and Windows alike) unless I am either low on disk space or looking for certain functionality.
Your point isn't lost, however; we may add this fetaure to a future revision of the installer. It just wasn't possible in the time given, as I mentioned earlier. That said, the source is available on our FTP site and "we're taking patches.":) -----
Because we include the Red Carpet application, installing and removing packages after you've done an install is very easy and most of our users didn't use the fine-grained individual package selection.
And yeah, it's pretty big... -----
And anyway, even Ximian isn't built on a totaly free model. Like Ezel and their services offering, they're going to start charging for use of the RedCarpet updater once it goes stable.
This simply isn't true. The Red Carpet service itself will always be free, as will updates to your distribution and Ximian GNOME. The revenue in Red Carpet will be in offering for pay subscriptions to channels or for sale downloads.
You are right about one thing, however. Ximian isn't built on a totally free model. We're a for-profit company, so we need to generate revenue from somewhere. All of our software is free, however.
Hi. I work at Ximian on Red Carpet. We will not charge for updates to Ximian GNOME or to the user's distribution. We will charge, however, for commerical third parties to add software channels to Red Carpet, and at some point in the future, we would like to have the ability to sell software through RC, but we'll never charge for the basic service. -----
This problem is actually more of an issue with your distribution than with Red Carpet. There are a couple of ways to get around this:
Edit your ~/.rpmmacros file and add things along the lines of "Provides: XFree86", so that the RPM subsystem will pretend that is on your system.
Install the XFree86 RPMs with "rpm -ivh --justdb" so that the entries are put into your package database but not actually installed. I would recommend against this one in general, however.
Beyond that, if you have any additional questions, feel free to send mail to our mailing list.
Nonsense. First of all, Outlook is more than just an email client. It not only integrates calendaring and contacts into the email client, but also allows you to schedule meetings, do things like polls over email, task lists, and project management. Outlook 10 (Outlook XP) will also have instant messaging built into it. It is quite slick.
You might think that Outlook is bloated then. You'd be wrong. All of this is done using COM components with well-defined interfaces so that integrating all of these is easy.
Evolution by Ximian is a free software alternative to Outlook and it is coming along quite nicely. It follows a lot of the same methodology: the application is built using Bonobo (the GNOME component model) components, and since the source is available, it is surprisingly easy to write your own components for Evolution. It does many of the things that Outlook does, although it doesn't (yet, anyway) integrate with MS Exchange. And Ximian, although all of their software is free, is a commerical entity and their software is of pretty high quality.
There is a ton of work involved, both coding and even more importantly in the design. The Evolution people are spread too thin as it is right now to take care of this, so it is nice to see some other developers making this a priority. It's important to keep a communication channel open between the client guys, though, so make sure you get their input on your designs!
Slashdot Mirror
The automatic updating is totally optional, and it will never "force" an update, so dependency problems can be resolved by the user.
Unless redcarpetd has the ability to prevent upgrades on selected packages I wouldn't trust it.
It does, through an .rcexclude file. It's not ideal (yet), but it's a start.
And until the packages get vetted better for conflicts I would be careful.
If you see dependency problems in our packages, it's almost certainly a bug. File it: http://bugzilla.ximian.com.
It's trivial to turn off listening to the remote port in rcd. So if you want to be totally safe, just shut it off, like any other service. You can still use it locally, and still have it pull down updates from the server (automatically, even!)
Yeah, the look is pretty much the same. Probably the coolest is Pango, which is the text layout engine behind GTK+ 2.0. There are some older screenshots at pango.org.
Most of the advantage, though, is at the API level.
In my experience, the anti-KDE FUD is rarely from the developers, but from a distressingly very vocal minority. I don't doubt that there may have been a stong anti-KDE feeling in the past, but I am hard pressed to try to find it these days. And KDE isn't immune to it either... their loudmouth trolls are just as bad as GNOME's.
As for the comments, if you read the whole thread, people have been spoofing as Miguel, Havoc, and others in the comments to the point where they are getting emails asking, "why would you say that?" I think that some people are against allowing negative opinions, but I would hardly classify that as an official GNOME position or even having consensus. The GNOME developers are pretty reasonable people and will listen (or at least certainly not censor) criticism of their work that is presented in a coherent and intelligent manner. The consensus seems to be to disable comments until someone volunteers to write a nice registration system.
The email to which you refer (From Alan Cox):
could not be more true. Why should GNOME allow such garbage to be posted to their site? We're talking about lies, spoofing, and trolling, not censoring sensible criticisms and reasonable technical arguments. You may say there is a fine line, but in that case, I recommend you read -all- of the Slashdot comments for any story and then read all of them on Gnotices or the Dot. Eliminating the anonymous posting and requiring registration with an email address would cut down on the crap a great deal, and just because these sites look like Slashdot doesn't mean that you or I have any right to post our comments on them; please direct me to any newspaper which prints every letter to the editor they receive unedited.-----
We found that most of our users wanted only to install either the default set they were given or to install everything with the old installer. The reason for the change is Red Carpet, because it is now much easier to install new software and remove software you no longer want from you system. The difference in the package sets themselves is pretty small (on the order of 30 megs or so) and the rather short development cycle of the installer application made us decide that it would be more worthwile to go with a few sets of packages rather than doing package-level maintenance.
Myself personally, I usually just pick whatever defaults are given to me by installer applications (Linux and Windows alike) unless I am either low on disk space or looking for certain functionality.
Your point isn't lost, however; we may add this fetaure to a future revision of the installer. It just wasn't possible in the time given, as I mentioned earlier. That said, the source is available on our FTP site and "we're taking patches." :)
-----
Yeah, this was an oversight. It's been fixed.
-----
Because we include the Red Carpet application, installing and removing packages after you've done an install is very easy and most of our users didn't use the fine-grained individual package selection. And yeah, it's pretty big...
-----
Give the po man a break, he's Mexican.
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Dude, please. Monkeys don't drink their own urine. But they do fling their own dung. You're next.
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Never.
-----
This simply isn't true. The Red Carpet service itself will always be free, as will updates to your distribution and Ximian GNOME. The revenue in Red Carpet will be in offering for pay subscriptions to channels or for sale downloads.
You are right about one thing, however. Ximian isn't built on a totally free model. We're a for-profit company, so we need to generate revenue from somewhere. All of our software is free, however.
-----
Hi. I work at Ximian on Red Carpet. We will not charge for updates to Ximian GNOME or to the user's distribution. We will charge, however, for commerical third parties to add software channels to Red Carpet, and at some point in the future, we would like to have the ability to sell software through RC, but we'll never charge for the basic service.
-----
This problem is actually more of an issue with your distribution than with Red Carpet. There are a couple of ways to get around this:
Beyond that, if you have any additional questions, feel free to send mail to our mailing list.
Thanks, Joe Shaw
Nonsense. First of all, Outlook is more than just an email client. It not only integrates calendaring and contacts into the email client, but also allows you to schedule meetings, do things like polls over email, task lists, and project management. Outlook 10 (Outlook XP) will also have instant messaging built into it. It is quite slick.
You might think that Outlook is bloated then. You'd be wrong. All of this is done using COM components with well-defined interfaces so that integrating all of these is easy.
Evolution by Ximian is a free software alternative to Outlook and it is coming along quite nicely. It follows a lot of the same methodology: the application is built using Bonobo (the GNOME component model) components, and since the source is available, it is surprisingly easy to write your own components for Evolution. It does many of the things that Outlook does, although it doesn't (yet, anyway) integrate with MS Exchange. And Ximian, although all of their software is free, is a commerical entity and their software is of pretty high quality.
There is a ton of work involved, both coding and even more importantly in the design. The Evolution people are spread too thin as it is right now to take care of this, so it is nice to see some other developers making this a priority. It's important to keep a communication channel open between the client guys, though, so make sure you get their input on your designs!