Re: Desktop Architects

[Mariano Suárez-Alvarez <msuarezalvarez arnet com ar>]

On Thu, 2007-02-22 at 18:43 -0500, Martin Cracauer wrote:
> Michael R. Head wrote on Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 11:55:09PM -0500: 
> > On Wed, 2007-02-21 at 12:34 -0600, Benjamin Gramlich wrote:
> > > Is anyone here following the discussion of Gnome on the desktop
> > > architects mailing list?
> > 
> > Yeah, I'm on both lists. Any particular comments?
> 
> I think there are very few people who actually discuss the real point.
> Linus found a case in the GNOME code where:
> - something that should be configurable wasn't
> - two other things of the same kind were configurable, both in an
>   ad-hoc manner
> - even there they lacked a decent frontend to actually do the
>   configuration possible
> - he sent patches to clean up the mess, treat everything the same and
>   make it configurable
> 
> After a messy discussion he makes the point that certain groups of
> developers in the OpenSource community are very quick shots to dismiss
> complaints without even looking into them, then after en initial wrong
> statement entrenching themselves in a bug-compatible manner throughout
> a non-conversation.  This appears to be more common with groups that
> target a wider audience, and want an easy to get into system.  I am
> afraid I have observed that myself with both GNOME and Fedora,
> repeatedly.  It is a sharp contrast to e.g. FreeBSD, where the default
> answer to complains is "You're right.  So what? Send patches or shut
> up.".

Patches are always welcome. Simply adding ‘features’ tends to not work
much, though, because feature are in most cases non-orthogonal and
interact with parts of the system the patch author had not even
considered. <http://ometer.com/features.html> and
<http://ometer.com/free-software-ui.html> spell out these issue quite
more clearly that I can.

If you browse bugzilla, you'll notice that patches tend to be slow to
come, though.

> Personally I am at the edge of ditching GNOME because I can't figure
> out how to put different background pictures on my different screens
> (non-Xinerama, fvwm2).  It's nothing life-threatening or even
> productivity-damaging.  But it shows that there's some seriously short
> thinking here (different aspect ratios on both displays make a
> same-picture policy a joke).  It doesn't help that I cannot find the
> code that actually does the picture display for the background.
> Digging through starting from the gconf variable names didn't get me
> far.

If you google for "gnome different background per-workspace" the first
result is <http://live.gnome.org/PowerUserTools> which includes a link
to an app called wallpapoz which does apparently what you want.

The request asking for this has been sitting on bugzilla for quite a
while (the bug is #48004) waiting for someone to come up with a sensible
design for the feature. Implementing it will probably be quite trivial,
-once- a sensible design is drafted. 

> It's mirroring my first GTK+ programming experience where I was
> looking for the $DISPLAY holder that is passed around in contexts,
> only to see there is none.  It's a hardcoded global variable so that a
> GTK+ application cannot (or at the time could not) open GTK windows on
> more than one display at the same time.

FWIW, you have been able to use gtk_window_set_screen
<http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/GtkWindow.html#gtk-window-set-screen>
since gtk+ 2.2, which was released in december 2002.

Cheers,

-- m


-- 
Mariano Suárez-Alvarez
http://www.gnome.org/~mariano