Re: Awesome new Mozilla roadmap!

[Ali Akcaagac <aliakc web de>]

On Sunday 06 April 2003 22:03, Kjartan Maraas wrote:

Hello,

> This looks to me to be a "discussion" where two people agree that something
> is wrong with the direction GNOME 2.x is going in. Namely you and the Galeon
> maintainer.

Yes but there are even MORE people who think the same. I don't want to value 
how many but I'm sure that there are a lot of people (my previous 70% still 
counts) because I think that there are a lot of people here that don't like 
special things within GNOME.

GConf, Button-Order, Nautilus views (I got an email from someone about this), 
general usability, flexibility and so on.

You should seriously solve these issues. You must solve them if you want the 
programmers come back to GNOME and work on it. I know that a huge amount of 
your previous supporters left because of this and new ones to come will take 
a lot of time specially they need to be trained and educated in the core of 
GNOME first. You can continue and ignore this fact if you like.

> The goal of the GNOME project is to create a usable desktop where you
> actually get to spend time doing real work, not flick a thousand switches
> just for the fun of it.

Right now it's everything else than usable. Usable is what I find on KDE but 
not on GNOME. GNOME right now is a poor mess where you deal more with stupid 
configuration, toothbiting with GConf and getting things halfway working the 
way you like after you spent 7 days on it. And you need a lot of other 3rd 
party applications to immitate a halfway working Desktop. But this alone is 
not the point. You are heavily announcing GNOME as THE open source Desktop on 
all sorts of places and you know it's not as mature as for example KDE or you 
know it lacks a lot of code, cleanup, polish AND TOOLS. Tools that make 
people exciting to use GNOME you are not helping the Open Source Desktop that 
way imo. If you look around at the tools then you see that everything is 
half, not finished, not maintained or simply not existing. Seriously do you 
expect business will get excited about GNOME ?

> > http://gnomesupport.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=7703#7703

I was more refering to the Link of Herzi. Your browser should autojump to the 
ancestor of that Webpage.

> Everyone has the right to an opinion, but it's the people who make the code
> who get to decide how things play out in the end. This is how it has always
> been in a free software project, and I think that is one of it's biggest
> strengths.

And that's what makes it totally weak again. People who can't teamwork decide 
what's going inside GNOME. Listen! people who are good coders aren't 
necessarily diplomatic people or people who know what a user wants or not, 
they are probably quoting text from stupid theoretical books they read and 
claim it to be the right decision. And there is the biggest issue hacking 
away from the real needs of a user that's what happens with GNOME right now. 
Hey, this was brought up many times and not the first time after all.

> No problem with that, but don't expect to get it your way just because you
> are of a different opinion. The biggest problem is that people end up making
> a lot of noise about small things and because of that nobody listens to the
> few really important parts of critique. IMO of course.

Yeah and here we are about the split community again. GNOME needs developers 
and people working on it right ? I think that we all agree here. And how do 
you think this should happen if the community is heavily split right now ? 
Throw an eye on the modules on cvs.gnome.org half of the modules related to 
GNOME 2 are unmaintained and left untouched for farious months now. Bugzilla 
is getting filled with reports and patches that still stay there until they 
grow roots. Maybe some of these issues getting fixed till 2.3.x or afterwards 
but I'm highly sceptical if I take the overall stagnation of GNOME 
development into concern. KDE is flying away it has reached other dimensions 
as serious taken Desktop Environment already and you still sit here and sleep 
and discuss what technical stuff to inherit next.

> > To leave heat out of this Mailinglist you can easily private email me and
> > we continue the conversation there.
>
> No need for that as long as we can be civilized and keep focused on the
> task at hand - improving the GNOME desktop.

Thank you, I'll appreciate it and thank you for your fair comment to me.

Maybe there is the one or other bold person who don't like certain things in 
GNOME and like to comment on it. Maybe someone is going to fork the entire 
GNOME project and make it suck less as it is right now. Going to the REAL 
right direction is an idea worth discussing.