Some Stuff...

[Cory Watson <gphat alpha cafes net>]

I might just be talking outta my arse here, but heres some things I've
noticed and wanted to bring to light somewhere, and this list seems like
the place to do it;)

First off, a buddy of mine is a sysad at an ISP, and hes been pretty
anti-gui until I showed him gnome.  Now the other day he decided he wanted
to recompile gnome, as he was running some ancient RedHat RPMs.  As he
fumbled through the whole process, he was coninually yelling at me at how
complicated it was, not from a technical standpoint, but just because of
the number of packages that had to be acquired and installed.  The tarball
instructions @ gnome.org show 34 seperate programs.  I'm used to this
process, I keep my version of all these packages up to date, and I enjoy
it, but that's because Im odd;)

If you dig a little deeper, the list gets longer, as I believe imlib
requires all the assorted image type libs for functionality (libpng,
libtiff, libungif, libjpeg).  Granted, gdk-pixbuf will replace imlib, but
at the same time, this takes away the advantage that imlib is on alot of
stock Linux systems.

<tangent>
All these rewrites make Gnome better, but now people are going to have to
have both Imlib and gdk-pixbuf installed, same goes for alot of other libs
that get rewritten, because alot of the programs I run are not gnomified.
</tangent>

What can be done to help this?  The introduction of Bonobo, gdk-pixbuf, and
the other associated stuffies (like eog) give us the benefit of having
better libs to run our software on, but they also split us off from the
traditional libs (good and bad I guess...)  Gtk and glib are independent,
and are not really Gnome specific, and I guess most of the libs and
programs can be run independently of the gnome environment, but part of the
attractiveness of Windows and MacOS is that the user has one 'package'.
One thing that Linux has always sported as both a detriment and benefit is
the extensive use of shared libraries.  Keeping up with them gets to be a
nightmare sometimes, but is an amazing tool at the same time.

On a tangent, has anyone ever thought of creating a CD of Gnome software,
and perhaps writing an installer?  Not necessarily a distro (not another!),
but a collection of the gnome packages in some native package format (RPM,
deb, or something nice and detached, we seem to like rewriting
everything;).  These things could be given out at all the shows were KDE
seems to get all kinds of play, but Gnome doesn't. (In the yumminess of
competitive spirit)

If we want to make strides on to the desktop of John Q Public, we need to
cater to them.  Gnome is moving rapidly, and I couldn't be happier with
1.1.4 of core and applets (1.1.5 in a few minutes), its beautiful and
functional, but my little brother wouldnt have a snowballs chance in hell
of getting it installed, even if he could install Linux;)

Maybe someone should just hide Linux from the user, integrate gnome and
Linux in a fashion similar to the way Win98 works, Windows over DOS.

Ok, I ranted;) Im gonna go compile 1.1.5 now;)

Cory 'G' Watson