Hm, blocked somehow (was: Where's all the movement?)

[mawarkus t-online de (Matthias Warkus)]

+++ Fri, Aug 06, 1999 at 07:26:12PM -0700 +++
Havoc Pennington e-mails me. Film at 11. Reply right now, after the break.
> 
> Oops, sorry about that mis-send. Ctrl-X is right by Ctrl-C.
> 
> Matthias, be patient. A roadmap is forthcoming; we do have a plan. :-)

This is reassuring.

What I'd like to see is some "official" statement about the Gnome
office suite, which except for Gnumeric seems to be in a sorry state.

Is there any reason to go on developing the "Gnome Workshop", if not
prestige and the fact that "well, it's Gnome"? KOffice at least is
light years ahead. I think the development going into Gnumeric (no
other part of the Gnome office suite seems to be heavily hacked on)
could be invested better in innovations we have been waiting for a
long time. Say Bonobo, or the new file manager, or the split of the
file manager / root window manager, or Gnome file dialogs... stuff
like that.

We can always write Gnome frontends to KOffice's components later. Of
course that would need support for KOM/OpenParts, which would need a
C++-capable ORB. ORBit is supposed to eventually do C, C++ and Guile.
Are these still the goals? Why don't I see any development there? 

I'm sorry if I ramble a bit too much in my latest mails here. But I
think there are some things that need to be pronounced. For some
reason, a project like KDE is a huge, well-organised,
corporate-looking (too corporate-looking!) machine churning out
amazing amounts of code (KOffice is at nearly a million lines now).
Gnome is not. Or at least it looks like it is not.

Don't get me wrong. I am contributing. I write hundreds of translated
messages, and I regularly file bug reports. I am learning the Gnome
and GTK+ API at the moment; I eventually want to be able to code a
bit. What hinders me is that I must learn the APIs by looking at the
header files and source file comments because either the documentation
is lacking in some points or the DocBook SGML doesn't render on my
machine since so far I have not been able to get a working DocBook
setup here.

That's another subject. There was talk of finally providing nice,
preconfigured packages for DocBook conversion which will cooperate
well with Gnome's build environment. I'm still waiting -- I've done a
lot of hand-tuning on my DocBook setup, and it still doesn't work
correctly. I'd like to get at the documentation at least.

I'm already happy that at least that Guide containing the Gnome
Tutorial has rendered correctly. That doesn't mean, though, that it
would have installed correctly into the integrated Gnome help system.

What's up with that system anyway? Why isn't it used more? Why does
it display index entries for most (but not all) man pages on my
system, while lots of those entries don't work?

And then there's the GtkXmHTML widget used by the help browser, and
not only by it, but by Screem, too (for example). There doesn't seem
to be development going on on it because we're all waiting for the
Mozilla Bonobo component. Well, that component is obviously waiting
for Mozilla to get usable. But that can take another *year*!

 From my point of view, it looks like too many parts of Gnome are
simply jammed or blocked by waiting for other parts.

mawa
-- 
Windows is the one true OS. MS invented the GUI. MS invented the 32
bit OS. MS is open and standard. MS loves you. We have always been at
war with Oceana.
                                                         -- Tracy Reed