Re: More Political Stuff

[Sean Middleditch <sean middleditch iname com>]

> 
> Sean Middleditch <sean.middleditch@iname.com> writes: 
> > But they bring up some good points.  Some of the stuff they criticize is
> > a bit legitimate.  Like  The 10 million dependencies for GNOME.  These
> > will be gone for the most part in GNOME 2.0, right?
> > 
> 
> Some of them are gone, some of them are moved around, some of them
> have undecided fates. It depends on which you mean.
> 

I just meant there should be a smaller number of packages to keep track
of for the end user.

> >From an end-user standpoint though, if you use binary packages with
> Helix update, apt-get, or a default distro install you shouldn't have
> a problem.
> 

Depends on the end-user, really.  I'm fine with it.  My father wouldn't
mind.  My mother would freak if she found out more than 2 things on her
computer needed updating... but then again, she freaks over everything,
so I guess it isn't that important.  Still, though... the less
dependencies, the better, really.  Not everything should be integrated
into one big package.. Gods, no, that would be a disaster.  But GNOME
shouldn't NEED that much.

> > Also the issue with StarOffice.  I've used StarOffice a couple times,
> > along with ApplixWare, and my God did they ever suck horribly.  Is
> > StarOffice REALLY going to be the official GNOME desktop?  Why can't we
> > develop our own software?  We have Gnumeric, and AbiWord could be great
> > too if it got worked on more (its development seems Gods-awful slow to
> > me).  We have Dia, and GIMP, etc.  What true point is there to using
> > StarOffice?  I mean, options are nice, but there needs to be one
> > official office suite, and I honestly think GNOME needs its own, not a
> > borrowed office suite that isn't that good to begin with.  Porting the
> > code to GNOME-libs and bonobo would probably take more time than just
> > writing our own: I know I find development a hell of a lot easier than
> > porting code to new API's.
> > 
> 
> All we are doing with StarOffice is working with Sun to develop a new
> office suite, using the best code from existing GNOME Office apps and
> also StarOffice. Probably we will end up using most of StarPresent,
> for example, but Gnumeric may replace StarCalc. This is all still up
> in the air and is a technical issue to be resolved by the GNOME Office
> and Sun hackers.
> 

OK, so, instead of working to make our own suite, we're just going to
work on porting another one that's going to need a lot of redesigning,
rewriting, restructing, and general redoing?

> > Finally, the speed.  GNOME does seem a lot less responsive than KDE (I
> > use KDE because no SDL games work properly on my machine when I run
> > SawFish, and no one on either the Sawfish or SDL team seems to care at
> > all).  When all the 10 million libraries get nice and assimilated, will
> > this speed up?  
> 
> This is all too vague. GNOME doesn't seem slow to me; what are the
> things you find slow, specifically? Are you using pixmap themes and
> other such stuff, or the default theme? How much memory/CPU do you
> have?
> 

Just starting GNOME takes about 5-15 seconds longer than KDE.  The
programs take longer to load, and most apps seem a bit less
responsive.  This isn't an issue with GTK, I think... A lot of KDE/Qt
apps I've seen have the same problem, but none of the core apps that
come with KDE.

Um, standard theme, as I recall (I'm at work, were I don't even have KDE
installed).  I've got a PII 450 and 128 MB, so there sure as hell better
not be a problem there... ~,^

> Re: the SDL/Sawfish problem, just send in bug reports, and someone
> will fix it eventually. John Harper is typically pretty responsive if
> he can reproduce the problem (try mailing him a Loki game maybe ;-)
> 

I can't find a place to make bug reports for Sawfish.  I got the SDL
people to start putting an SDL bug system, though, which is good.

> > Also, gnome-libs and gnome-core does have a lot of cruft
> > for backwards-compatibility sake.  Will GNOME 2.0 strip all the crap,
> > since it wont need to be backwards compatible anyways?
> > 
> 
> It will strip things few people are using.
> 

OK.  SO a lot of the old compatibility functions that are only used in
old apps are going to be gone?

> Havoc
> 
> 
> 

Sean Middleditch