On Wed, 2011-05-18 at 18:59 +0200, Jan de Groot wrote: > This is not just about kFreeBSD, but about any non-linux OS that GNOME > runs on. If the attitude becomes "screw them, they're different", then > GNOME should officially screw every distribution that doesn't provide > the latest and greatest software too. I support the notion of concentrating on Linux. But there's a dangerous slippery slope here. In the last few weeks I've been trying to run GNOME 3 and gnome-shell on Ubuntu via the "gnome3 developers' PPA". The number of times I have been mocked and derided and laughed at on IRC is staggering. "That's not a real distro". "That's not maintained by real GNOME people". "Don't use that" "Switch distros!" Jesus. This package repository is maintained by a bunch of people (some Canonical employees, some employees of other companies, some volunteers, *all* by definition GNOME community members) who are clearly putting in a lot of effort to make it work. That PPA was set up in no small part because early GNOME 3.0 marketing efforts identified that it really mightn't be a bad idea if the large number of people running deployed Ubuntu systems could try the new GNOME experience. It was also setup (and is used because) this certain cluster of Debian-based Linux systems really does have a rather large installed base. For a lot of good reasons most of those people cannot easily change distros, even if that were to be desirable. [And it's not. Many installed sites made a technology decision (Fedora → RHEL, Ubuntu edge → Debian stable, etc) one way or another and have since built system management infrastructure on top of it. They're not going to be in a rush to revisit that]. I'm fairly certain that the GNOME community is not trying to say "thou must run Fedora". Of course not. But people asking nervously about packaging formats in a thread about system level dependencies are honestly concerned that such a distro mandate might be next on the list. [Yes, I know it would make the documentation team's job easier, and I'm sorry to oppose anything in that direction]. I think that requiring the Linux Kernel and common Linux base system libraries is a reasonable step in the right direction for GNOME. We are competing with several 900 metric pound gorillas who have total control of their stack and laugh their heads off at us when they even bother to take notice of us. We're not them. And we collectively have limited bandwidth to go around. I'm sad if this means we can't easily support the cool efforts of smaller communities of people working on [fringe is the wrong word. Edge?] projects like Solaris and the *BSD distros, but I also think the interfaces argument is a reasonable one. But meanwhile our current and near future user & developer base *is* fragmented across several Linux distros and I'd like to hope we can be tolerant of them. AfC Sydney
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