MATE desktop environment (GNOME 2 fork)

[Zoltan Boszormenyi]

2011-12-10 16:36 keltezéssel, Rahul Sundaram írta:
> On 12/10/2011 03:30 PM, Zoltan Boszormenyi wrote:
> u
>> Not so fast, there was a point in time when
>> the whole Linux development community
>> was Linus Torvalds. Live and let live.
> You would have a better point there if MATE was a new desktop
> environment trying to grow a community.  GNOME 2.x is a complex codebase
> with a lot of legacy.  Maintaining it as a single person is impossible.
>  What has been accomplished is that someone renamed the 2.x gnome* to
> mate* but the effort to move it forward is a lot more involved than
> that.  There is atleast security fixes to take care of and compatibility
> issues to consider.  A badly maintained desktop environment would result
> in false hope and reflect poorly on the distribution as well.
>
> A Fedora maintainer could still push these components through and take
> care of them but they will be partially performing the role of upstream.
>  If someone is motivated enough to do it, then by all means, live and
> let live.
>
> Rahul

I think his (the developer/maintainer of MATE) whole point is about
scratching a personal itch. Just like in all interesting OSS projects.

E.g. I recently contributed two Mingw32-w64 packages out of
personal interest. It's not for bragging, it's not the same level as
decyphering and understanding the whole GNOME 2 codebase.

If he can gather a few more developers and a lot of users (who
even on this list threatened upstream GNOME developers with
pitchforks), the MATE project might even succeed. We just need
to be patient towards the project and watch the outcome.

There are quite a few other projects that become successful
and I am not sure their task has smaller complexity with reverse
engineering, like ScummVM. At least MATE has the advantage of
using an open source codebase.

BTW, as for my relation to GNOME 3, at first I was scared by
the reviews that compared it to GNOME 2. But I needed the
goodies (newer compiler and other stuff for development) of
Fedora 15 so I jumped into the deep water. I was surprised
how easily I adapted to it. Old dog can learn new tricks, too.
I am 39. :-)

Best regards,
Zoltán Böszörményi