Re: esound and playing mp3's ?

[Rebecca Ore <rebecca ore op net>]

On Sun, Jan 10, 1999 at 02:33:09PM -0500, Gregory McLean wrote:

> At the risk of making this thread drag on longer then it should... How is 
> RedHat paying someone to work on Gnome making things diffrent? Sure RedHat is
> paying someone to work on something, does that give other people to be rude
> and condesending?

I've done spam cancelling.  The instant you expect people to approve of what you
do, you can thoroughly expect them to criticize you upside and down for
it (hi, Jeff).  Praise is a very scarce commodity.

Second, I don't think we started rude and condescending.  I was asking
for help and getting ignored for a bug that I thought I'd found (and I
think we did determine that there was a bug in the configuration check
that didn't bail out when things were missing).  I've had enough
experience to know that often bug reports by newcomers get ignored.

Third, some program have traditionally never attracted the interest in
the Open Source community that tools and toys for programmers attract.
I thought that perhaps one of the reasons RedHat was paying some
developers was to divert their attention from the sorts of programs that
the Open Source community would develop and perfect on its own to those
that have traditionally been neglected.  The word processing program is
the program that Open Source programmers don't need for themselves.  One
of my friends said, "write it with vi, print it with troff."

But outside of this community, the word processor is the key program for
desktops.

I did just compile Gnumeric and since it doesn't have print functions,
it's pretty indicative that the plan is to have a separate Gnome-Print.
This really really does need to be released with Gnumeric and with gwp.
If not, Gnome isn't a real enterprise desktop.  If so, then someone at
RedHat needs to figure out how to motivate some programmers to get this
done.

The Open Source community has wonderful programming text editors:  I
have a small collection of them, as a matter fact, even though I'm not a
a programmer.  They're so cool I just like to look at them (I use vim,
jed, and XEmacs).

But after all these years, no fully functional WP.  Okay, for my needs,
I can use Maxwell.  I don't need to print envelopes, do mail merge, or
any of that.  I can turn in .rtfs to my publisher.  Shrug.

It's not my personal needs here, it's that I thought one of the things
RedHat/Gnome and KDE were trying to do was develop systems that allowed
other sorts of users to share the stability of Unix systems, Linux among
those.

If this isn't the goal, okay, Gnome, like vile, vim, jed, and XEmacs, is
still neat enough to play with, but it's certainly not going to be
something non-programming companies are going to be putting on their
desktops.

At this point, getting the printing functions and the wp up to the
functional level of lyx or Maxwell is the singularly most important task
we have *if* the goal is to put Gnome on non-programmer, non-hobbiest
desktops.  And if working on a wp was cool and groovy, our wp would be
at the stage that Gimp is.  Obviously, it's much less interesting
programming or it would have already been done.  I don't have to know
anything programming to understand that.  Maybe it's just flat out more
difficult programming than graphics programming, but that seems
counter-intuitive given the complexity of the text editors.

I'm not saying the goal *should* be putting Gnome on non-programming
enterprise desktops, okay.  But if that is a goal, then the Open Source
model either proves it can transcend its usual limitations (lack of
focus in developing word processors and general office tools) or not.

My own personal frustration is that I saw a lot of people doing a lot of
brainstorming about wp a couple of months ago, and all that seems to
have gone poof.  As I said in another post, the programmers especially
need the tarballistas to help with this one, especially those of us
who've worked with text processing in various forms (from secretarial to
hypertext editing in my case).

And beyond that, if Gnome is to develop programs for specialists who
aren't programmers but who have large technical knowledge bases, then
the programmers need betas testers from those communities also.

Kapish?

-- 
Rebecca Ore
Tarballs Now!