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GNOME GUI Software Programming Upgrades Linux IT Technology

Havoc Pennington on GNOME 3's Future 309

Posted by CowboyNeal from the this-way-or-that-way dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Havoc Pennington, lead developer of GNOME, wants to fork GNOME 3. 'So the forces of existing userbase, the easiest-to-reach future userbase, cross-platform applications, and funded development efforts are strongly pulling GNOME 2 toward conservatism. I think GNOME 3 should be a fork for that reason.'" This has been a common practice for not only many open source projects, but proprietary systems such as Solaris for major revisions, so it's not as tumultous a change as the word "fork" may imply.
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Havoc Pennington on GNOME 3's Future More

Havoc Pennington on GNOME 3's Future

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  • Translation (Score:5, Funny)

    by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <<moc.liamg> <ta> <namtabmiaka>> on Thursday April 21, 2005 @05:06PM (#12307539) Homepage Journal
    Darn those pesky users for making us stablize things instead of hacking cool new features! I mean, which would you rather have, a foot menu that works or spatial Nautilus?

    • Re:Translation (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Senjutsu ( 614542 )
      Spatial Nautilus, frankly. There are about a thousand app launchers that accomplish the same thing as the "foot menu", but Spatial Nautilus is the only file manager avaiable that works the way I want a file manager to work.

      • Re:Translation (Score:5, Funny)

        by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <<moc.liamg> <ta> <namtabmiaka>> on Thursday April 21, 2005 @05:10PM (#12307603) Homepage Journal
        Spatial Nautilus is the only file manager avaiable that works the way I want a file manager to work.

        You must be a GNOME developer. ;-D
        • I'm not a GNOME developer and it works the way *I* want too. How nice of you to pretend otherwise :)
        • No, just a user.

          Mods, why is this marked "insightful" rather than "funny"? Did I suddenly become a GNOME dev when I wasn't looking?

          • Re:Translation (Score:3, Insightful)

            by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) *
            I have no idea why the mods thought to mod me that way, but I can tell you that you're in the minority of users. Myself and most users I know much prefer the single window approach to file browsing. It's fast, it works, and it doesn't clutter your desktop in weird ways. I'm glad that you like it, but the decision to force it on the entire world was not the best one ever made by the GNOME project.

            Ok, I'll stop being serious now:

            No, just a user.
            Liar! You're a KGB mole sent to disrupt our computing abilit

            • Re:Translation (Score:5, Insightful)

              by Senjutsu ( 614542 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @05:35PM (#12307899)
              I'm glad that you like it, but the decision to force it on the entire world was not the best one ever made by the GNOME project.

              Force it on the entire world? Last time I checked, it was still possible to make Nautilus use "Windows File Browser" mode, and the gnome developers hadn't rendered the dozens of other Windows-esque file managers available for X inoperable. They added a choice, which happens to be the default setting, to allow Nautilus to behave in a different way. It's pretty much the only X file manager out there that dares to do something other than clone the Windows file browser, and for that "crime", it's widely castigated by the community.

              God forbid those of us who think the Windows browser model is a horrible User Interface design should have an actual, viable option to choose.

              God forbid that the GNOME developers should do anything other than follow the pack, and make their product indistinguishable from everyone else's.

              God forbid that everyone who likes the browser model should have change an option, or install one of the dozen other managers that cater to their needs. But no, those of us who wanted something different were finally given an option, and that crime is apparently unforgivable.

              • Re:Translation (Score:2, Insightful)

                by Anonymous Coward

                God forbid those of us who think the Windows browser model is a horrible User Interface design should have an actual, viable option to choose.

                Sorry, you can't dodge the point by demonising the "Windows browser model". Practically every file browser works in this way. Why? Because that's what most users like.

                God forbid that the GNOME developers should do anything other than follow the pack, and make their product indistinguishable from everyone else's.

                There's a reason everybody else does it a d

              • The windows explorer is horribly flawed, you're absolutely right. You're absolutely wrong that everything but Nautilus is copying that. The basics of the interface go back to programs like midnight commander and xtree. Windows explorer is a particularly horrible implementation of it* and by setting it up, unilaterally, as some sort of reference implementation that everyone else is supposedly copying from (including the many programs that predate it!) you get a strawman award.

                *IMHOP explorer.exe from Windo

              • Re:Translation (Score:2, Insightful)

                by Anonymous Coward
                And the "Open links in Browser Window" option is such a great description for turning spatial on/off. (What is a 'link' and what kind of 'browser' are we talking about? I personally relate URL/Web browser to those words not folders/file browser)

                I don't mind the Gnome devs making spatial the default (WinXP does it too) but when the fucking option to turn it off is called something completely stupid and unrelated to opening a new window for each folder it pisses me off.

                I did post about this on the Gnome f

              • Re:Translation (Score:4, Insightful)

                by MemoryDragon ( 544441 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @02:28AM (#12311015)
                The main problem with spatial nautilus are twofold. The problem of file browsing was not a problem of file broswing per se, but nautilus was god awful in the file browsing mode.

                From day 1 nautilus was a desaster, first it was slow but the functionality was there. Then they took out splitting, then they took out tabbing, then they took out boomarking. What was left was a desaster of a file browser. And then they went the spatial route, which is fine per se, but did hide many important commands in half documented hotkeys and basically made it impossible for the average user, to change the behavior, but hiding it in a registry like config file on how to change the stuff back into almost equally awful nautilus browsing mode.

                Gnome has bigger problems than nautilus, which still works for most users. Gnome needs a compound document model, it needs one which works with the existing models (kparts and the openoffice model). Currently the stance is, KDE has something working, the gnome project tries to reinvent the wheel, mostly fails then either dumps the idea alltogether (bonobo for instance) or takes the kde implementation under free desktop and then reimplements it and forces sort of the kde people to use the gnome implementation (happened with the automatization stuff and various other things).
                Also gnome needs a decent cd burning frontend, the current frontend is a desaster, same goes for the networking browser...

              • Re:Translation (Score:3, Informative)

                by m50d ( 797211 )
                But when it was first introduced, THERE WAS NO OPTION. It was added in the next .1 release, because there was so much user outcry, but the gnome people, when they first introduced it, GAVE USERS NO OPTION. (You had to change an undocumented setting by directly editing the registry)

              • Re:Translation (Score:3, Insightful)

                by molnarcs ( 675885 )
                Force it on the entire world? Last time I checked, it was still possible to make Nautilus use "Windows File Browser" mode, and the gnome developers hadn't rendered the dozens of other Windows-esque file managers available for X inoperable.

                A few days ago I read a review on a news portal (index.hu - it's hungarian) about suse linux. This is not a technology portal, it is more like cnn or bbc - politics, culture etc. The title of the review caught my attention, it was something like a SuSe Linux review - it

      • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @05:12PM (#12307622)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • The way I want a file manager to work in X is illustrated beatifully through rxvt.

          Probably: s/rxvt/shell/

          rxvt is a terminal emulator.

          Cheers
          Stor

        • Re:Translation (Score:3, Interesting)

          by TheRaven64 ( 641858 )
          Shells in X always feel clunky to me because of the lack of an `open' command. On NeXT systems and on OS X, you can simply say `open {filename}' and have it opened in the default application. One really nice thing about this is that you can say `open .' to have the current directory open in the default file manager (useful if you want to do something to multiple files that can't easily be specified by a regex).

      • Re:Translation (Score:5, Funny)

        by imsabbel ( 611519 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @05:24PM (#12307774)
        hm.
        The strange thing is that i remember this whole now "spacial" thing since windows 95.
        Back than it was called "why the fuck does this damn explorer open every folder in a new window" and was usually disabled by every computer literate after 2 hours....

        • Re:Translation (Score:5, Informative)

          by Slack3r78 ( 596506 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @05:29PM (#12307829) Homepage
          That's because the Windows 95 approach to being spacial wasn't very good. On the other hand, MacOS = 9 used a spacial finder, and its absence in OS X is a common complaint amongst the old school Mac crowd. Just because the one implementation you're experienced with sucked doesn't mean the whole concept of a spatial filebrowser is bad.
          • Silly question, but what's a spatial interface, and regardless of whether I might want one or not... what was good about the way Mac OS9 did it?
          • Spatial Finder is still available in OS X -- it's just not the default.

            I live by it, and am exceptionally happy with the spatial browsing model. I think at least a good 50% of the computing population would also prefer it if they took the time to break down their ingrained habits.

            It's a shame that the Linux crowd, supposedly an "alternative thinking" crowd, doesn't seem to be willing to try.
        • Since when was Microsoft's implementation of anything ever the best one?

          If you want to see a *good* spatial navigation system, look at MacOS 1.0-9.2.2... it seemed to work for almost 20 years for Apple, and their users loved them for it.

          Microsoft fucked it up by:
          1) Not providing window management tools. (i.e. in MacOS you can command-click to open a folder which automatically closes the parent folder at the same time.)
          2) Not providing file access tools. (i.e. in MacOS you could place files in the Apple
      • Just a tip: The plain old Midnight Commander (MC) still exists and THAT is actually still the best File Manager I know about. Yes. I seriously use that to Manage My Files, MC is still what I find most effective to move and organize files. Nautilus is to me a very nice File Launcher, meaning it is nice for looking through your files and opening them in programs. The ability to drag and drop files from it to programs is also very nice, but this has nothing to do with managing files. Application launcher seems
      • Perhaps we could just fork nautilus. That way you can use spatial nautilus and the rest of us can stop wasting time navigating round hundreds of randomly located windows.
      • Zsh is the only file manager that works the way I want a file manager to work.

    • Re:Translation (Score:5, Insightful)

      by eno2001 ( 527078 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @05:11PM (#12307610) Homepage Journal
      Funny, but good point. However, I woud say that a fork may not really be necessary. Just having a set of Stable and Devel branches is pretty good. After all, not everything in Devel winds up in Stable usually. So for people like me who want the extras we'll keep using Devel as production. The sheeple can follow onto the Stable. ;P

    • Open source software is splitering/fragmenting (Score:4, Insightful)

      by syousef ( 465911 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @06:33PM (#12308512) Journal
      Yes, lets all fragment our efforts to kingdom come, then try to compete with proprietary software.

      Lets have 3000 different distros, and no clear leader. Lets make sure every distro has slightly different configuration tools. While we're at it lets force users to compile their source, (including the kernel otherwise their hardware won't work).

      Lets have 3 different kernel firewalls, in about as many years.

      Lets have 300 desktop managers, none of which quite work or interoperate.

      Lets have 3 different office suites, none of which quite translate MS Office stuff quite right. ...and then lets wonder why Linux isn't taking off on the desktop.

      I'm getting goddamn sick of this, and I'm a developer. I'm also damn tired of defending it. I've had comp sci students roll their eyes at me when I had to recompile my kernel to add support for a printer so we could print data off in Linux. I've also had Astronomy Masters students feel overwhelmed with Linux - avoiding it or dumping it out of frustration early.

      Lets decide whether we're doing cool techy geeky play stuff, or whether we want to produce something real and tangible and useable by everyone. Lets make up our minds on any given project what our goals are (or what the goals for our group are). Lets contribute to existing open source instead of starting our own little pet project that does no better than anything that came before it. Lets get a bit of unity back into open source, before it goes the way of the dinosaur!!!
      • I'm getting goddamn sick of this, and I'm a developer.

        The answer you are looking for is the GNOME/OO.org/Mozilla desktops being developed by Sun, Novell, et. al. Yes, it took companies with profit motives to cherry-pick the FOSS software base and come up with a stable configuration to market against Microsoft.

        This is probaby the best operating mode for FOSS, where a huge anarchic mass of developers creates seemingly random technology, which is then assimilated and digested by companies whose "value adde

        • Hmmm... (Score:3, Funny)

          by SunFan ( 845761 )

          Let's add Evolution to the mix for kicks...that makes GNOME/OO.org/Mozilla/Evolution...whose acronym is GNOME!

          Obviously this is a sign from the Gods Of Recursive Elegance (GORE? He's in on it too?) that we're on the right track.

      • Re:Open source software is splitering/fragmenting (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Cthefuture ( 665326 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @08:09PM (#12309192)
        As a developer I hate it too. However, I understand why the situation is like it is.

        Writing software is a lot like creating art. That's one reason why I love it so much. I love creating stuff from nothing. That is the problem though.

        How many artists do you know that just like to copy other people's work? I don't know many. The joy is in the creation, not blindly copying what someone else created. People can influence eath other but it's not often that we like to just outright copy someone else. That's why programmers don't like to work on other people's projects. Everyone has their own style. It's too personal. We do it sometimes but there will always be that underlying desire to do your own thing.

        This is where commercial companies have a huge advantage. By controlling other people you have one vision but many workers. The workers work either because either they are getting something out of the deal or are otherwise physically being forced to do what some leader says.

      • Re:Open source software is splitering/fragmenting (Score:5, Insightful)

        by glockenspieler ( 692846 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @08:13PM (#12309219)
        a few quotes from "syousef"
        Yes, lets all fragment our efforts to kingdom come, then try to compete with proprietary software.

        Here's the thing. Alot of us aren't trying to compete with other software companies. I want something open, hackable, stable, and works for me. I don't give a flying f*ck whether it "competes" with someone else or not.

        Can we please get off the idea that everyone's goal is to bring down Microsoft??? Yeah, alot of stuff happens in OSS that isn't sensible if we're going to compete with MS or others. But then, for alot of us, that wasn't, isn't, and never was the point.

        Lets have 3 different office suites, none of which quite translate MS Office stuff quite right. ...and then lets wonder why Linux isn't taking off on the desktop.

        Pardon my french but F*CK LINUX ON THE DESKTOP. That manta is getting used to beat to death anyone that doesn't want 'one size fits all" approach. I use linux all of the time, I have a perfectly usable desktop for me. Its great if changes happen that bring more people to linux but whether that does or not is not going to keep me up nights. Its worked well with as few of us as there were in '97 (for me), and its still good.

        Lets decide whether we're doing cool techy geeky play stuff, or whether we want to produce something real and tangible and useable by everyone.

        I have and its neither. I have work to do and what i have now lets me get alot done. It happens to be real, tangible, and useable. By everyone? No, perhaps not everyone. Do i care that I don't include "everyone"? Not one single bit.

        Diversity is good. Its confusing, its complicated, and it can be frightening. Its that diversity that will prevent it from going the way of the dinosaur (i.e. extinct). Anyone that believes that diversity will lead to extinction knows little about evolution and little about OSS.
        • Pardon my french but F*CK LINUX ON THE DESKTOP.

          I don't know...I kinda like having a nice system that is based on open file formats and protocols. Just in the past year or two, I think, has the notion of a "Linux desktop" ("GNOME/OO.org/Mozilla desktop" is more accurate, IMO) matured to a point to really being a true Microsoft replacement. The only times I boot Windows are to view a retarded website (not often), test a new web page in IE (the responsible thing to do), or to play a dinky game.
      • Lets decide whether we're doing..

        And right there you lost me. I didn't realize this was a collective rather than a community.

        There is no 'lets decide'. There is no 'single direction'. Theres just a bunch of people happening to be doing similar stuff.

        What you are saying only differs in scale from saying "Lets have only one video card standard" or "Why have both OS X and WinXP". Heck, I have 1 distro, 1 firewall, 1 desktop manager 1 office suite. How? because when I think 'choice against WinXP' I th
      • Sir, I think you might like a Mac. :)

        I'm just playing with yah. Yeah, I feel your pain on the occasional difficulties. I'd have to say though, I don't think there are 3000 distros. I think there are 10 real ones, the rest are bizarro projects with varying degrees of popularity.

        The good thing is, people have made some serious strides towards making the major ones play nice. I think we're on the cusp of a serious breakthrough where a good number of the major distros will be virtually indistinguishable f
      • What the hell do you mean spli[n]tering? All he wants to do is continue to release security patches and bug fixes to Gnome 2. Sort of like Microsoft releasing security patches or bug fixes for Windows 2000 (do they still do that?).

        Same thing happens with the linux kernel. The theory is that the second latest major release gets extremely stable, which appeases the coorperations and administrators, and you're free to add new features to the new release, which appeases the desktop linux crowd.

        If you'r

      • I'm getting goddamn sick of this, and I'm a developer. I'm also damn tired of defending it. I've had comp sci students roll their eyes at me when I had to recompile my kernel to add support for a printer so we could print data off in Linux. I've also had Astronomy Masters students feel overwhelmed with Linux - avoiding it or dumping it out of frustration early.

        What the fuck?

        Sorry, bucko, but this is your own damn fault. Nobody said you had to compile a kernel. Every packaged distro I know of provides th

    • Get it right: (Score:2, Informative)

      by BrokenHalo ( 565198 )
      From Havoc's page:

      2005-04-21: Slashdot

      Ah geez, again I foolishly fail to remember that phrasing things a certain way results in Slashdot articles which inevitably have misleading headlines and summaries. For the record, my point is not that we should do a GNOME 3 (especially right now), and it definitely isn't that I personally intend to do a GNOME 3. It's that if someone did a GNOME 3, the right way to do it is to create a fairly long-lived branch (aka fork) of the project while continuing the GNOME 2.x

  • Don't call it Gnome 3... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by EnronHaliburton2004 ( 815366 ) * on Thursday April 21, 2005 @05:06PM (#12307551) Homepage Journal
    The name 'Gnome 3' is reserved for the core Gnome product.

    If you're going to fork the core product and possibly make an incompatable branch, please give it another name.

    • Re:Don't call it Gnome 3... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Chirs ( 87576 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @05:08PM (#12307575)
      Eventually, this new thing will stabilize and become the new "core Gnome project".

      Consider it akin to the old 2. numbering in the linux kernel.
      • Consider it akin to the old 2. numbering in the linux kernel.

        If one of the lead kernel developers took the Linux Kernel, and created a new project called 'Linux 2.8', that wouldn't necessarily mean that the new project is 'Linux 2.8'.

        There needs to be more then a single developer involved in the decision.

        • If one of the lead kernel developers took the Linux Kernel, and created a new project called 'Linux 2.8', that wouldn't necessarily mean that the new project is 'Linux 2.8'.

          I think that's what Linus does with every new kernel version. He and many others are adding new features to successive versions of the 2.6 kernel, while others stay back maintaining and upgrading 2.4. Does that mean the Linux kernel is "forked"? By the technical definition, yes. Does it mean Linux is fragmented and features aren't

          • Well, the Linux kernel is a different development model. For years, Linus was the 'benevolent dictator'/gatekeeper, and would allow or deny code into the Kernel.

            Gnome has a governing commitee, which decides on the direction of the project, and which packages should be allowed or denied. Havok is one of the main developers, but he is not the soul gatekeeper.

            I would also argue that Gnome is a much messier project then the Kernel. Does 'Gnome' include OpenOffice or not? Is every Gnome app coded in the same s

      • Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)

        by grahamsz ( 150076 )
        It seems that the browser-now-known-as-firefox did this. They forked mozilla, created something quite a bit better, then worked out the kinks, and eventually it'll merge back and become mozilla.

        I have no problem with gnome forking and creating a cutting edge version that's unstable for a year or two. It might reinvigorate the project so they can make something that gives kde a run for it's money.
        • And I have no problem with that, because the new project was called 'Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox'.

          They didn't call it 'Mozilla Browser 2', because it wasn't always clear that Firefox would eventually be merged back into the Mozilla project.

          I think the same thing should happen here.

    • Re:Don't call it Gnome 3... (Score:5, Funny)

      by masklinn ( 823351 ) <<ten.nnilksam> <ta> <gro.todhsals>> on Thursday April 21, 2005 @05:09PM (#12307589)
      why would it? While the Gnome 2.x are clearly reserved for the currect gnome development, a major version change may mean several deep changes, and the creation of a "double tree" as the development of Gnome 2.x keeps on living during the birth and maturation of Gnome 3. Ever heard of Winamp3? (well, ok, it failed, but then we could get Gnome 5 couldn't we?)
    • Well, this Gnome 3 would eventually become the core product wouldn't it? And presumably bugfixes, appropriate new features, etc., would feed back into Gnome 2 while the two continued in parallel.

      Sort of like having kernel versions 2.4 and 2.6. (although no doubt someone will leap out with some technical reason why that's totally different, but it looks the same in principle to me) :-)

      • Re:Don't call it Gnome 3... (Score:5, Funny)

        by double-oh three ( 688874 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @05:13PM (#12307646)
        Maybe they could call it Gnom3?
      • Just because Havoc says something doesn't mean it's true. Havoc doesn't own the Gnome project, and doesn't have the authority to make a big, sweeping change like this.

        In the past, sometimes his plans for Gnome have been in conflict with other members of the team.

        If Havoc wants to fork the project, fine. But don't call it 'Gnome 3' unless it has been designated the 'Gnome 3' project by the board.

        Now, if this was a message from the Gnome Board of Directors [gnome.org], I would feel differently.

        • Re:Not always true (Score:5, Informative)

          by Havoc Pennington ( 87913 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @05:29PM (#12307835)
          Read my blog post - it's a reply to _other_ people proposing GNOME 3, I'm saying "_if_ we did a GNOME 3, here is how it would make sense and what it would look like"

          • Re:Not always true (Score:5, Funny)

            by 680x0 ( 467210 ) <vicky.steeds@com> on Thursday April 21, 2005 @05:38PM (#12307925) Journal
            Hi Havoc,

            What about a similar but distinct name for the experimental version (ala Fedora from Redhat). Possible names:

            • Elf
            • Ogre
            • And, of course, the Slashdot favorite: Troll

            (By the way, I have your book on GTK app development... It's very good. Thanks.)

          • I appreciate your work (Score:3, Interesting)

            by bhsx ( 458600 )
            I seriously am envious of anyone able to code anything decent. I have developer envy.
            In any case, I was wondering some of the same things that you put forth in the blog about fractally "petrifying" the GNOME codebase. It was my first DE i'd used with linux (rh5.2, I think CDE [ugh] was default) and loved it; but it never seemed to add features.
            KDE 3.2 grabbed me after a few years of just using black/fluxbox and seems to really have the upper-hand in "creating value" when upgrading from previous versi
    • You don't know what you are talking about. This *is* the core Gnome Product. He is just saying that work should continue on Gnome 2 after Gnome 3 comes out for people that would like to keep using it.

    • Re:Don't call it Gnome 3... (Score:4, Informative)

      by lazy_arabica ( 750133 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @05:19PM (#12307700) Homepage
      The name 'Gnome 3' is reserved for the core Gnome product. If you're going to fork the core product and possibly make an incompatable branch, please give it another name.
      Uh, are you sure you understand what we're talking about ? This developer want to fork Gnome 2 into a new development branch that will eventually become Gnome 3. He's not talking about creating a new and independant project....
    • You take the usage of the word 'fork' far too seriously. He means that the codebase should be forked, so that Gnome 2.x and Gnome 3 development can continue in parallel. I hardly think Havoc Pennington is suggesting the community makes an official split in a vein similar to Goneme. (I always found the 'Gone' in Goneme to be somewhat amusing.)

      Forking code does not imply the political structures have to fork too. In this case a fork would just be an internal tool for constraining Gnome 3 development away

  • Again, meh (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PunkOfLinux ( 870955 ) <mewshi@mewshi.com> on Thursday April 21, 2005 @05:08PM (#12307571) Homepage
    If they want to fork, let them. If it becomes any good, it'll be used
  • Maybe the GNOME guys should follow how the Linux kernel works. Keep even numbered GNOME releases as the stable, it works for everyday use. Update the even number versions with bug fixes, and maybe small targeted improvements. Then on the other hand have the odd number GNOME releases be the wild and crazy, lets see what kind of interesting desktop we can create. Once something stable, usable and decent looking is created, make the odd numbered release the new even releaes.
    • That's exactly what they do.

      The point is, what would GNOME 3 be? Something wild and crazy and new? Probably. Does anybody know what that is yet? No. So it makes sense to fork and go off and do this in another branch so the experiment can be tested without affecting mainline GNOME.

      The reason they don't do that in the regular unstable dev cycle is because they're 6 months (and also, nobody really knows what would be done for GNOME 3 anyway).

    • They should do that! At least, if they are not able to have better functionnalities than KDE, they can claim they have a bigger revision number! :p

  • Just use KDE (Score:2, Funny)

    by zardo ( 829127 )
    Why doesn't he just join up with KDE? Theres enough bulk in KDE that it should fit his needs nicely.

  • So in other words... (Score:5, Funny)

    by spun ( 1352 ) <loverevolutionary&yahoo,com> on Thursday April 21, 2005 @05:11PM (#12307620) Journal
    There is no fork.

  • Havoc Pennington (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 21, 2005 @05:13PM (#12307642)
    That has got to be one of the coolest first names ever.
    • I was just thinking that. Actually, I was thinking that "Havoc Pennington" is about the most Hollywood name I've seen on the net, like, ever. "Havoc Smith" or even "Havoc Torvalds" wouldn't be nearly as cool.

      He'll have to be played by Dennis Quaid in the movie version.

  • Imagine it was a spoon instead of a fork (Score:5, Funny)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @05:14PM (#12307654)
    oh wait, there is no spoon

  • This is more like a branch than a fork (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GauteL ( 29207 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @05:16PM (#12307679)
    Havoc is NOT talking about breaking out of GNOME because he doesn't like the current way.

    He is talking about forking off development for GNOME 3, because it would be too disruptive to move everyone onto GNOME 3 immediatly.

    Basically GNOME 2 would continue as is, with incremental changes, while someone starts hacking on GNOME 3 for a future release. They would diverge quite heavily after a while, but when GNOME 3 has started getting momentum, GNOME 2 can be closed down.
  • As a 90% user of Windows (ya I hate it) and 10% user of Linux (I hate it too), I think the biggest problem with linux is its incessant forking. At least Windows develops some sort of standard and things look about the same on all computers. It's like Windows is monogomous.. It's boring, but reliable.

    With linux, every distro breeds more distros.. every project breeds more projects.. They're forking like rabbits!

    • Re:I'm not a player I just fork a lot.. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by kidgenius ( 704962 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @05:38PM (#12307924)
      Yet Microsoft breaks previous versions of software and APIs with new releases. The only difference between MS & OSS is that MS releases once every 3-5 years and you have nothing in the interim except for security updates. Gnome, KDE, etc., all create tons minor with new stuff every 6-8 months. The only way to give the new major version of Gnome/KDE (like a new version of Windows) is to create a seperate development-only branch on the side. When it is complete (in that same 3-5 year timeframe as Windows) then it is released and the old version becomes deprecated.
      • "Yet Microsoft breaks previous versions of software and APIs with new releases."

        Only rarely. The media player that I developed for Windows 98 still runs fine on Windows XP, 7 years later. I have no doubt that it will run on Windows Longhorn as well.

        Hell, it's pretty dammed impressive that my code still runs on an OS with a completely different kernel, filesystem, driver model, and just about everything else. By all means, XP is a *very* different OS from 98.

        There were good reasons for breaking compatibil
    • I think the biggest problem with linux is its incessant forking.

      Not all distros do. Pick an old-school, stable distro. Don't go with some flavor-of-the-month. Try something like Slackware, or shit if you want stable, Debian stable is rock solid. Linux gives you the freedom of choice to pick the right distro for you.

  • Good for him (Score:3, Insightful)

    by photon317 ( 208409 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @05:24PM (#12307773)

    This is a great strategy on his part. I view this as analogous to the great gcc2->egcs->gcc3 "fork", which was quite successful.
  • "Let's not make any configuration options available to the users at all! No settings, preiod. If they think they are smart enough to reconfigure the product, let them read through the source and figure out what cryptic Gconf keys they need to hack. Yeah!" Seriously though, is forking such a good idea? I can't say I've run into too many gnome bugs (and I use it everywhere.) What gnome really needs, like a number of large-scale open-source products, is to have all the features 'finalized.' It seems that some
  • I hope Novell gets involved and has a Mono core dependancy. RedHat won't like it, but they're not the only game in town now that Novell bought Ximian.

    Mono has the benefits of being able to run Python, C#, Java, C, C++, VB, and a whole slew of other languages that the JVM is incapable of. Not only do you get the benefit of automagic bindings to various libraries, but you get tons of .NET libraries that will be written now and in the future.

    You still write core parts in C, but more and more in managed cod

    • Re:Novell should get involved in the "fork" (Score:4, Informative)

      by stor ( 146442 ) * on Thursday April 21, 2005 @08:51PM (#12309452)
      I'll leave that to the FUDsters who are better at cowering under the covers instead of embracing good technology.

      You mean like the FUDsters that derided the use of BitKeeper?

      Cheers
      Stor
  • is that it's going to require a code fork to be able to ever graphically edit your applications menu.

  • Very rude comment (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xiando ( 770382 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @05:40PM (#12307949) Homepage Journal
    I know this will sound rude. But I feel like saying it anyway. Gnome has very much been focused on becoming more userfriendly in Gnome2 and it has done this by a less-is-more approach. This has, for me, made it a lot more user-unfriendly. The simple file dialog boxes are a very good example of what I mean: They now by default open up half-opened so users will not be confused by the more advanced options in them. But the problem for me is that the advanced options are things I use every time, meaning an extra click or keyboard press every time I need to use them. There is no good reason for them to appear half-open, it is just done to make it simple. The result of this is only extra time spent using them every time to make it easier to use the first time for complete idiots. Something similar is also done with the features to make it more user-friendly: If a feature is to advanced for a beginner, they are simply removed or placed where they are completely unavailable or require a great deal of effort to use. Gnome2 has come user-friendly to the extend where it is almost impossible to use productive on a day to day basis. I seriously hope Gnome3 will be better. Not that I think I will ever use it as a main desktop again, but as I use a lot of Gnome2/GTK2 programs (like I also use KDE programs in my fluxbox) this annoy me very much.
    • apparently, you've never had to deal with OSX very much...
      I haven't used gnome2 extensively, as I'm mostly an Enlightenment user myself, but seriously, try using a mac for something more advanced than web browsing and you'll see how many clicks you need there!
      I mean, I'm sure you could specify keyboard shortcuts for it, but they're not created by default. Meaning almost every operation, including accessing the Apple menu has to be done by a mouse click... It sucks. Yet people love it's "user friendliness".
      • You have evidently not dealt with OSX very much, either. The menu bar, starting with the Apple menu, is opened with Ctrl-F2. For further keyboard combinations (and the ability to customize them), go to the Keyboard and Mouse control panel, under the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.

        You can do almost anything with the keyboard under Mac OS X, but of course, you have to bother to find out how (duh). How is that different from any other OS?

    • An intelligent system would observe your behavior and notice that you always open them. It would update your profile, and the boxes would be opened by default.

      It is possible to have a simple system that is not "in your way", it's just a lot more work. I wish people would spend more time on such details.

      This is the subject of the book The Art of Interactive Design [amazon.com] by Chris Crawford, it's very insightful reading.

  • Sensationalism (TFA Updated) (Score:5, Informative)

    by bottlerocket ( 605232 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @05:45PM (#12307998) Homepage

    Pennington isn't proposing anything. He's merely examining the current discussions on the future of Gnome and exploring possible options. From TFA:

    Ah geez, again I foolishly fail to remember that phrasing things a certain way results in Slashdot articles which inevitably have misleading headlines and summaries. For the record, my point is not that we should do a GNOME 3 (especially right now), and it definitely isn't that I personally intend to do a GNOME 3. It's that if someone did a GNOME 3, the right way to do it is to create a fairly long-lived branch (aka fork) of the project while continuing the GNOME 2.x series on a 6-month cycle in the meantime. I'm responding to other people's blogs here, rather than proposing something.

  • Gnome 2 has problems now (Score:4, Interesting)

    by poofyhairguy82 ( 635386 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @05:46PM (#12308007) Journal
    The idea of a fork for Gnome 3 sounds great, but Gnome 2 has problems that won't be fixed in the next release. I use it everyday, and I like it, but I hope that Gnome 2 can become a little more settled before it loses everyone's attention.

    First of all, some xcompmgr support would be nice. Gnome has a few BIG problems with using that program, which is unfortunate because using it on my computer speeds up the sluggish Gnome.

    Another thing would be better wireless support. Unlike KDE, there is no app that can do what Kismet can. The network app. lets you connect wirelessly, but no part Gnome lets you scan. In this department many good programs have appeared that would fix this problem. I like- Wifi Radar [gnomefiles.org]and this applet [ubuntuforums.org]

    They only need to be incorporated (or packaged with a Gnome distro for the love of diety).

    Many people think that Gnome's biggest problem is RAM usage, and they might be right. 256mb feels VERY different than 512mb on the same machine. I personally believe that this problem was made worse in the last release, not made better. I think that 2.12 has intentions on fixing this, so I care more about Gnome 2's interface problems.

    • Another thing would be better wireless support. Unlike KDE, there is no app that can do what Kismet can. The network app. lets you connect wirelessly, but no part Gnome lets you scan. In this department many good programs have appeared that would fix this problem. I like- Wifi Radarand this applet

      Actually that's not true. The NetworkMonitor applet will launch network-admin (gnome's network configuration tool) if you click the button to configure the interface you're monitoring. From there you get a drop-d

  • Rethinking Your Assumptions (Score:5, Interesting)

    by WombatControl ( 74685 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @06:08PM (#12308255)

    Even though I depend on GNOME libraries for my projects (specifically PyGTK), I think this is a good thing.

    The reason why is that having a bleeding-edge version that integrates things like Cairo, xcompmgr, more eye candy, etc will give us who like to have a system with all the eye candy a chance, without having to worry about adding them to GNOME 2.x and possibly disrupting users who want a no-frills desktop. When GNOME 3 becomes stable, it can replace the old version.

    But moreover, the Linux desktop is at an inflection point - we're just starting to get the kind of nifty eye candy that other desktops have. GNOME 3 should be a chance to get GNOME ready for the future of the Linux desktop - using Cairo to render the GTK widgets, using Luminosity as the next GNOME window manager, etc.

    Sometimes it's healthy to fork off your code and rethink some of the assumptions you made rather than having to deal with the cascading problems that can crop up when you try to muck about and fix those messy hacks we all seem to create.

    Forking isn't always bad - sometimes it's necessary to eliminate cruft. If the end result is a better desktop, then that's what should be done.

  • Seems reasonable (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ta bu shi da yu ( 687699 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @06:10PM (#12308270) Homepage
    Seems to me that Havoc wants to create a platform to try out new features that may or may not be accepted by users, and another platform that is more "traditional". When a feature is found to be really useful then they could merge it into their traditional version.

    The problem with this, of course, is when the underlying libraries like atk, etc, are altered fundamentally. In that case, things will become a right mess.

  • Useful Precedent: PGCC -- GCC (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mprinkey ( 1434 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @06:43PM (#12308597)
    Back in the "old days," I remember the pgcc/gcc split. The old version of gcc was in dire need of an update, but was relied upon by many projects and users. The pgcc effort came online and made remarkable improvements. The old gcc and pgcc coexisted for years. People wanting the fastest compiled code used pgcc. Them finally pgcc was deemed stable enough and became gcc.

    Revolutionary work can be done in a fork and I surely wouldn't discourage it. It will make distributions a little more complicated and may cause compatibility issues, but there is a clear benefit here. If the whizbang new stuff is worthwhile, people will use it, patch the bugs, solve the compatibility problems, and use it.

    • Minor correction (Score:3, Informative)

      by jd ( 1658 )
      Actually, EGCS was the fork that became GCC, after GCC's main branch took a wrong turn. PGCC was a patch-set on top of EGCS to provide Pentium (and later) optimizations, because EGCS's optimization code was pretty pathetic when it came to all the nifty new features Intel & co. were adding to their CPU.

      (Indeed, it's still not that great, or you'd be seeing a lot more i786, -p3 and -p4 RPMs out there. Not many people use an actual i386 these days, except in the space industry.)

      PGCC's optimizations wer

    • Re:Useful Precedent: PGCC -- GCC (Score:4, Informative)

      by Michael Hunt ( 585391 ) on Thursday April 21, 2005 @07:15PM (#12308863) Homepage
      Not quite. You're thinking of EGCS, which was a project to update GCC 2.7.2 because the EGCS devs didn't like the direction that the FSF were going in with GCC 2.8.

      PGCC was a fork of EGCS which was able to emit code optimised for i586-class CPUs. There were versions based on EGCS 1.0.2, 1.0.3 and 1.1. Eventually, the PGCC optimisations got folded into a version of EGCS, and EGCS begat GCC 2.95, which eventually became GCC 3.0.
    • What??? The pgcc project basically died, though maybe some features were merged back to gcc. What you're probably refering to is the egcs project that forked gcc and proved so much better than it eventually replaced gcc. pgcc is (AFAIK) a version of gcc that was modified by Intel engineers to produce better code on the original Pentium.

  • Gnome 2 is nowhere near complete (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dtfinch ( 661405 ) * on Thursday April 21, 2005 @09:09PM (#12309548) Journal
    It has:
    * No menu editor.
    * Hard coded un-overridable mime-sniffing that gets lots of things wrong (because it's foolish to even try to anticipate every single file format and code to handle them all) and then forces its will on the user (won't open some of my text files in gedit for "security" reasons).
    * A file browser that defeats all that paranoid mime-sniffing "security" by hiding extensions .desktop extensions (like Windows does with .lnk files, but without the arrow telling you it's a shortcut) allowing them to spoof regular documents with icons and everything.
    * Menus that scroll like win95 when very full. A menu editor and/or overflowing into columns would help a lot.
    * And a continually decreasing level of configurability.

    I suppose aside from that it's very good. It's the desktop environment I'm using now, and the one that I keep coming back too after repeatedly trying to dump it in favor of the alternatives.

  • Havoc's right. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by John Allsup ( 987 ) <slashdot@chal i s q u e.net> on Friday April 22, 2005 @03:51AM (#12311269) Homepage Journal
    There are many good things worth keeping in GNOME, and many worth changing. Some are foundational issues, and the best way to handle those foundational issues (such as getting Storage implemented and suchlike) is within a fork. I love GNOME (and use KDE under GNOME, rather than the other way around) and wouldn't like to see the GNOME 2 line disturbed too much in the name of progress, yet I wish to see that progress happen.

    On a related topic, I'm not up to speed with the details of programming GNOME: in which order should I learn my way round the libraries?

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