Re: More Political Stuff

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat 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.

>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.

> 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.

> 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?

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 ;-)

> 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.

Havoc