Re: Did GNOME go 1.0 too early?

["Jesse D . Sightler" <jsight pair com>]

On Thu, 04 Mar 1999 15:58:49 Damien Miller wrote:

> > Was Linux 1.0 ready for widespread commercial use? 
> 
> Of course not, but it did not pretend to be the operating system
> of the future. In many ways it was still a private research project.

And had they done so, would it have been likely to be better?  Real great products take
years to build, and Gnome is absolutely no different.  1.0 is useful now, but certainly
not ready for widespread pounding by idiots, yet.  :)

> > Things take time, and sometimes it's ok to release a version 1.0
> > that isn't perfect for many reasons.
> 
> Perhaps what is most frustrating is that 0.99.8 was so close to 
> being 1.0-able. 

I really disagree.  Control-Center would have been unstable and tending towards unreliability
even if they did wait another few weeks.  Actually, it has always been unstable, so
what else would be new.  :)  GMC seems to only have small bugs, but most are going
to take lengthy periods to fix.  Gnome-libs and Gnome-core, OTOH, are both in
good shape.

> > > Rushing out software before it is ready has given us linux-2.2.0
> > > (an embarrassment by Linus' own account) and now GNOME-1.0.
> >
> > Yeah, but Linux 2.2 was in development for 2.5 years and still ended
> > up with bad bugs in the first release.
> 
> ... many of which were introduced at the last minute.

And many of which weren't.  For example, the ldd core bug and swap file problems
were there for quite a while from what I understand.

-----------
Jesse D. Sightler
http://www3.pair.com/jsight/