Re: Will Gnome _EVER_ be stable?

[Travis Saling <trav u washington edu>]

> I had finally gotten a decent working environment on the Debian machine,
> after a week or 2 of tweaking. Last night as I logged out, I got the dreaded
> Gnome pop up errors :-( Needless to say when I logged on this morning my
> environment was TOTALLY trashed, not panels all!
> 
> I've seen this failure in various flavors of Gnome for longer that I care
> to remember.
> 
> Will Gnome _EVER_ become a stable environment to try to do productive work
> in, That is one that I don't have to spend hours rebuilding on a regular
> basis?

This has not been my experience at all. FYI I'm using Red Hat 7.2 with
Ximian's Gnome currently, and have used the Red Hat packages before with
good results.

I did have my environment get messed up once quite a while back, but
fortunately I had my home directory backed up and recovering the
previous .gnome directory was trivial. Since I tweak my system a lot,
I've found it useful to keep a gzipped tarball of my .gnome directory
around (I do that for most things I mess with). That way, if my setup
gets hosed, I just have to get out of gnome, rm -Rf .gnome, and then
unpack the tarball.

Unfortunately I don't know anything about the Debian Gnome packages, so
I don't know if what you describe is a common experience. (I'm not
saying this applies in your case, but) When I've helped friends
troubleshoot stability problems with various packages, a lot of times I
find out they're in the habit of doing forced installs. In those cases
the problems are often solved by going back and reinstalling, making
sure to actually meet any and all dependencies.

Sorry not to offer more specific help.

-- 
Travis Saling
Webmaster, UW Electrical Engineering
trav u washington edu / webmaster ee washington edu
(206) 543-8984