Re: Did GNOME go 1.0 too early?

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

On Wed, 03 Mar 1999 22:25:35 Jason Tackaberry wrote:

> But gmc, while it's progressed _very_ impressively over the past month, is
> still very unstable for me (and many others, as I've seen in this list).
> Miguel has been fantastic with responding to bug reports, and I'm sure he is
> very swamped.  But, IMO, gmc is very important for a user-friendly desktop
> (that GNOME aims to be).  An unstable gmc will leave novices very dissappointed
> (because I don't think I'd be wrong to say it would be the most used part of
> GNOME, perhaps next to the panel).  I hate to pick on gmc (because I can't
> emphasize enough how amazing it has progressed over the last 2 months); there
> are many other parts of gnome that are rough around the edges and could
> probably use another month of cleaning.

Has gmc actually gone 1.0 at this point?  I haven't seen any indication of this?

> I am mostly concerned, though, that there has been a bit of outside pressure to
> get something out the door.  For instance, I believe RedHat wanted to ship
> GNOME with RH 6.0, and I wonder if the powers that be aren't pressuring the
> folks at RHAD to hurry things along.  This is understandable from a commercial
> sense, but it just isn't the Linux way.  To the RHAD gang: how has management
> been through the development so far?  Do you feel _too much_ pressure to get
> something released?  (A little pressure is, of course, always a good thing.)

I disagree, I think that most of the pressure has been internal.  :)  Seriously,
I suspect that some of your problems with Gnome-Pager stem from the lack of certain
features in the WM-Hints.  These cannot be expanded with the freeze still in effect.

> Linux (and also GNOME) is under tremendous media scrutiny.  This means that
> any tiny shortcomings will be amplified.  

Yep, and we really ought to be glad.  This is not a commercial product, so even if these
problems are magnified, they will not cause us to go bankrupt.  What they will do
is increase the number of useful bug reports and increase the number (and hopefully quality) of
feature requests.  In other words, you are right that some things will be heavily criticized, but
there is no way to avoid this at this time.

> GNOME 1.0 can't and shouldn't be
> expected to be perfect, but little and obvious details that are usually
> corrected during the debugging phase will stand out quite a bit.  And I
> shouldn't have to say that once someone like Jesse Berst experiences his
> first segfault, he will immediately report that the whole thing is garbage.
> We're smart enough to ignore his rantings, but most of future Linux converts
> probably aren't.

And the sad fact is that he will be right.  But give us some credit here, we are
a lot better than Windows 1.0, a lot better than Windows 2.0, a lot better than
Windows 3.0, and a lot better than Windows 3.1.  :)  Admittedly, those products
don't make for much of a comparison, but the point is that first releases of an entire
desktop environment are not going to be perfect, or even great.

Think about this, was Linux kernal 1.0 good enough to compete with Solaris or SCO at the time
of its release?  It is just impossible to get a complete system put together fast
enough to make a 1.0 release THAT good.  :)

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