clueless GNOME bashing (was Re: [rescue] Mozilla Firefox)

[Gregory Leblanc]

Topic of this message is set assuming that everybody here has thick 
skin, and that we're all interested in facts, and not hearsay.

rescue-request at sunhelp.org wrote:
> Subject: Re: [rescue] Mozilla Firefox
> From: Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com>
> Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2004 16:18:09 -0400
> To: The Rescue List <rescue at sunhelp.org>
> 
[snip]
> Now we not only have to deal with copy-cat KDE and Gnome, we have to
> deal with the latest Gnome wet-dream: Mono, a GPL'd duplication of
> Microsoft .NET.

OK, data point 1.  Mono has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with GNOME. 
Nothing, zero, zip, zilch.  Sure, the same guy who started GNOME started 
mono.  He's done nothing for GNOME since he started on mono, and the 
projects are unrelated.

> You just *thought* resource use was high before...
> 
> As far as I can tell, the next major release of Gnome will have this
> built in, and a number of apps are going to be ported or will be
> otherwise integrated.

Here we are on data point 2.  The next release of GNOME (we're counting 
the recent 2.6 release as "current") almost certainly won't have 
anything in regards to programming languages used.  3 months (time 
before freezes happen) isn't enough time to get all of the issues hashed 
out.  9 is more realistic, and discussions started only a month or so 
ago.  If you wanted to know this, you could go read the publicly 
available posts about the next release cycle to the mailing list, or the 
beginnings of thinking and talking about this that Havoc Pennington 
posted to his web log.

> It's too bad, because some of the stuff being built on top of Mono are
> actually neat ideas, but I don't want to pay the rest of the price.
> 
> Just look something like the Gnome weather "applet".  It eats 23MB of
> RAM.  All it does is do an HTTP query of a weather site, parse it, and
> display the data in a tiny windows.
> 
> Hello?
> 
> Try running strace on a Gnome application some time.  The stupid code
> loads themes by brute force searches of a set of pathnames.  Why
> the hell doesn't Gnome figure out all of the paths that have objects
> in them when it starts?
> 
> In fact, why does a Gnome application have to search for those parts
> anyway?  They all use the same objects for the most part, so why doesn't
> the Gnome environment cache this information and feed it to each
> application through shared memory or something?

There is MUCH less hacker time available than there are interesting or 
desirable projects to work on.  This doesn't even touch on the fact that 
it's hard to find people interested on working on code that is 
essentially "invisible" to the end user.  Feel free to step up and write 
some prototype code, or propose this on the mailing lists that the 
developers read.
	Greg