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

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Tue, 27 Apr 2004 @ 19:35 -0700, Gregory Leblanc said:

> [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. 

It has a lot to do with Gnome, because a lot of Gnome hackers want it,
are using it, and they talk a lot about it.

A lot of the latest Gnome buzz is about programs written on top of Mono.

Interest like that drives decisions.

> >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.  

I agree, which is why I didn't suggest that it would.

I said Mono looks like it will be in the next *major* release of Gnome,
and I still think that is likely.

> 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.

I did.  It's irrelevant to what I said.

> >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.  

So why not spend it on the important things first?

If their is not much hacker time, then why is so much of it being used
on eye candy, M$ copycatting, and feature bloat?

> 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.  

That's absolutely true, however, I see very little effort to recruit
people like that.  If you don't agree, show me where they do it.

> Feel free to step up and write some prototype code, or propose this on
> the mailing lists that the developers read.

That won't solve the problem.  The entire community has to change its
methods.


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shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["The grieving lords take ship.  With these
our very souls pass overseas." -- Exile]