Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap

[Richard Stallman <rms gnu org>]

At a technical level, I wish that GNOME made it easier to relate
the visible GUI level to the underlying level of the command line.

When I designed GDB, previous debuggers for C programs had C-level
commands (viewing source code, specifying line numbers, examining data
using symbol names and displaying values as C structures) and
machine-level commands (viewing instructions, specifying addresses,
examining data as words or bytes) and no easy way to connect between
them.  That was often a hassle, so I took care to provide ways to move
between the two levels, for instance to convert addresses into line
numbers and vice versa.

The GNU system today has a similar kind of problem in that error
messages from GNOME say nothing about what's going on at a lower
level.  They only say "This didn't work".  It seems to be intended
to completely hide the lower levels of the system even when we WANT
to look at them.

I suppose most users don't know about the lower levels and don't want
to know.  But many users do want to know; they want a way to find out
about the failure: what program, what command was run, what process,
what file, what error message, etc. 

For the next major release, how about providing a systematic way to
get this information in windows that pop up to tell you something failed?