Todd Kulesza Leaving Dropline GNOME

Lispy writes "The founder of the popular Dropline GNOME environment for Slackware, Todd Kulesza, announced yesterday that he is leaving his project. In a note on the Dropline homepage he explains that he simply doesn't have the time to maintain three different Open Source projects anymore. With Patrick Volkerding being temporarily out of business and Todd leaving Dropline GNOME, I guess the future for Slackware GNOME fans doesn't look bright these days. Who wants to hop in and continue Dropline?"

Who wants to hop in and continue Dropline?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who wants to hop in and continue Dropline?

I do! Of course I don't have the time, experience, or skill to do it, so I won't.

What a waste!

[dorward]

What a waste of a chance for a good pun. "Dropline Maintainer Drops Out"

Re:What a waste!

[MarkRose]

Naw, Todd Kulesza's just being a slack-er ;)

Re:What a waste!

[Lispy]

Yeah, I realized that too. I blew it. ;-/

Vulnerability.

[MarkRose]

This is the primary reason why I never got into slack. Slack is basically built by one man, and it's the same story with the gnome packages for slack. While this can give a project a strong direction, it also leaves the project very vulnerable to the whims and lives of those maintaining it. And while I could figure out how to maintain it myself, I don't have the resources to do a proper job, and thus I stick with more popular, team-produced projects.

True, but

[trelin]

One of the beautiful things about Slack is the fact that it can be manually updated for long periods of time without using formal releases; I know people still using a base system of 7.1 running 2.6, X.org, the latest GCC/Glibc, etc., with wonderful success.

Granted, it takes more manual work, but if you like the system to begin with it generally doesn't bug you.

Re:Vulnerability.

[0racle]

Making Slackware packages is increadably easy. Maintianing it yourself is a lot easier then any of the others but more importantly, it should be relatively easy for someone(s) to step in and take over. Except for dropline, that looks a little more indepth then your average Slackware package.

His other projects

[Noksagt]

In case anyone is interested, his other two projects are:
Optimystic [dropline.net]--CD creation for GNOME
Drivel [dropline.net]LiveJournal client for GNOME

Opteron Port

[turgid]

Slackware badly needs an Opteron/Athlon 64 port. Most new PeeCees will be 64-bit pretty soon.

I notice that there has been an IBM S390 port, so all three people who want to run Linux on S390 can choose a different distro (Slackware, SuSE, Red Hat). If IBM wants to make friends in the community, they could have spent the time and money on something more useful.

I've been a loyal Slackware user since 1995, and I'd offer to do an Opteron port if I had a machine and the time... I've been slowly amassing the required clue-set over the years, but that has coincided with a very busy work schedule. Maybe in the neay year...

Re:Opteron Port

[0racle]

All you'd need to do for most packages is add a line to the SlackBuild:

if [[ "$ARCH" == "Opteron"]]; then
OPTIMIZ="-O2 -march=athlon"
fi

change how $ARCH is defined as at the top of the script, or something like that, I don't know what the Opeteron is identified as, and then a build system. You might want to add a /lib-64 and /usr-lib64 or something like that, but it can't be all that hard. glibc has x86_64 as an $ARCH option, so its probably just a matter of going through and altering the rest of the packa

Re:Opteron Port

[turgid]

I have a friend who's interested in doing this too. After Christmas.... :-)