complete system or individual components?

[Nathan Froyd <maestrox geocities com>]

I don't know if this has come up, but I'm a little disgusted with some
stuff and this looks like the best place to air it out. I invite all
types of comments on what follows.

When I first heard about ElectricEyes (hereafter EE), I was ecstatic. I
downloaded the first beta version as soon as it was available and was
incredibly impressed. I heard it was being integrated into GNOME and
didn't care - until I tried the CVS version. There I discovered that the
source had been changed so that it was unable to compile without most of
GNOME being installed.

Does this sound like software bloat to anybody?

GNOME and other desktop environments should not be clones of CDE but
rather a set of programs that share the same look and feel.
Understandably, some components will require GNOME libraries - the help
browser for example - but "little" programs such as EE should not be
dependent upon a massive set of stuff being installed. 

Little programs - this is part of the GNOME manifesto, isn't it? Yes,
the programs should all work together (common interface - the X programs
standard in the distribution don't do this, yes), but if somebody wants
a single program, they should be able to do that without gobs of
external libraries being installed on their systems.

Nathan