[geeks] !!!

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Mon, Dec 10, 2001 at 01:04:47AM -0500, Dave McGuire wrote:
> > So, are you actually trying to get the GNOME desktop going on your Impact? 
> 
>   I've been trying for ten hours.  I'm about to give up.

I've noticed that in the past, say 2 years, gnome has gotten a lot harder to 
compile.  When I first started using GNOME, it was easy to install, as was 
gnumeric (which I could see it wasn't ready to take on excel in raw power, but
it did meet my needs) and abiword.  Well, now these past few months, I've been
trying again to get gnome installed via source.

I've wasted much more than 10 hours on it, and I still can't get the core 
packages installed.  Basically, I can't get the applets, core, control center,
or gnome-media packages installed (although theoretically all dependencies have
been met).  Gnome applets requires core, which requires control center, which 
fails over esd compile errors.  Gnome-media also fails over esd related errors.
I have esound installed (but not running, which shouldn't matter just for
compiling anyway), although I really didn't want to, since I really didn't want
any additional layers cluttering up my sound layers at this time.  Someday I'd
like to get alsa going, but that another issue.  

As to Gnucash, I can't get that on due to g-wrap, which refuses to compile
because it can't find guile while compiling (even though ./configure had no 
trouble).

So, obviously the whole GNOME thing isn't exactly peachy on it's supposed ideal
platform.  The main thing that I'm missing is gmix.  And I want to try gnucash.
Otherwise, I use programs that depend on gnome related libraries (pan for one),
but I don't actually run gnome itself (I'm a wmaker/lots of rxvts kinda guy).
 
> > I hope that it works better than enlightenment does on an O2.  I hope never
> > to repeat that horror.
> 
>   I don't think I'll ever know.  Enlightenment is unbelievably slow, and
> has been sitting at release 0.16.5 for like a year.  The authors have
> been saying stuff like "0.17 is just around the corner!" and "very
> exciting work happening this week!" for the past six months at least.
> I think it's dead, or close to it.

I've never cared for enlightenment.  What really blew my mind was when someone
wrote a sawfish script to allow you to use enlightenment themes, AND IT WAS 
FASTER than enlightenment itself!?!  Yetch.
 
>   I *really* like KDE, and I worked for days getting KDE v1 built under
> IRIX about two years ago...but the mailer was very unstable at the
> time (as in..."losing mail" unstable), and neither of the two
> newsreaders would even start up.  I'd really like to run KDE2, but it
> isn't even close to being compilable...and it's written in completely
> incomprehensible C++ that the developers don't seem interested in
> making portable.  Every few months someone files a bug report about
> their IRIX compilation failures, some by seemingly accomplished C++
> people who, despite their knowledge of the language, STILL can't make
> heads or tails of that code...and the pleas for help go unacknowledged
> and unaddressed.

I've always considered KDE to be a bad idea.  Well, it was the first out, so 
kudos for that, but why C++?  That just makes life harder when it comes time
to try and use it from other languages, and only a fool would argue that every
gui program should be written in C++.  C libraries are just better exposed for
writting external bindings (unless you write your toolkit in C++, but rather 
than expose it to applications via C++ .so files, you expose it via sockets).

But then C ain't perfect either.  Look at the PIA it is to write new GTK 
widgets, especially if you want to use your new widgets from a python program.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd