Re: gnome developer docs - not sgml

[Havoc Pennington <rhpennin midway uchicago edu>]

On Tue, 3 Nov 1998, Brandon S. Allbery wrote:
> I'm not talking about libraries.
> 
> ORBit has broken once or twice when built without indent, and it doesn't like 
> non-GNU indent.  Likewise, packages tend to acquire an implicit dependency on 
> GNU versions of programs --- they *do* get fixed, but it tends to happen in 
> such a way as to indicate that people aren't thinking about non-GNU systems 
> when they make changes.
> 

This is stupid. Bugs creep in. Like most Gnome developers, I have no
Solaris box, so I can't test compiles on one. I have at least used Solaris
some, so I have some idea what might be on Solaris, but I have not used
HP-UX or Irix for development, for example. The differences between bash
and sh are quite subtle, and it is easy to accidentally use a bash
feature, or a gmake feature;  similarly for gcc and ANSI C. We use the
-ansi flag in most Gnome stuff, but still gcc will occasionally just warn
when another compiler will barf.  The ORBit indent problem was fixed; it
should probably use other versions of indent if available, but I have no
idea what options those versions take. 

We do our best to make it work on all systems, but really it is very
uncommon for newly-written software to work the first time you try to
compile.  Since we don't have Solaris systems, and we *definitely* don't
have HP-UX systems, we must rely on others to point out the problems on
those systems. And that means the bug fixes will be delayed a little bit. 
Gnome is version .30, not 1.0.

Frankly I think you are whining. If it's not portable, send patches. Or at
least put up some resources: if you give some Gnome developers accounts on
a Solaris machine with some disk and CPU, we can test compilation on that
machine. Or you could contribute a Solaris machine to run Tinderbox. But
if you can't live with problems or help, go away for now. Wait for a
couple maintenance releases past 1.0. 

> And I get just a bit tired of being a second-class citizen because I have to 
> use a non-GNU OS.
> 

Oh, stop being melodramatic. The more users of free software there are,
the faster it develops, because some percentage of those users are
developers. 90% or more of Gnome users are using a GNU-ish system. So the
GNU-ish version of Gnome moves faster. But abstractions like esound and
libgtop and glib all take portability into account, and we are not
proposing anything sick like relying on ext2fs. 

If you want the Solaris support to be improved, you are free to do it, or
hire someone to do it, or wait for the finished release, or just wait for
a snapshot that happens to work. You can also help by submitting non-flame
bug reports, and/or providing compile accounts to interested developers,
and/or donating a Tinderbox system so we can use the Netscape approach to 
portability.

But don't flame volunteers. If it breaks you get both pieces. Period.

Havoc