Developers responsibillity to Fedora Users

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Wednesday 28 September 2011 13:48:09 Darryl L. Pierce wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 08:26:27AM +0200, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 11:30 PM, Terry Barnaby <terry1 at beam.ltd.uk> 
wrote:
> > > But its seems like a lot of people would like Gnome2 back. Why doesn't
> > > someone, who has a problem with it just rebuild and release Gnome2 for
> > > F15 (with a different package name) ?
> > 
> > Apparently it is already being done (sorry, forgot the new name of the
> > fork). However, AFAIK, it is far from straightforward to "rebuild and
> > release" it. Gnome 2 and 3 use different versions of the same set of
> > libraries, and cannot coexist on the same system easily.
> 
> The challenge then is to upgrade the Gnome 2 code to use the newer
> libraries.

Which is essentially impossible without *a* *lot* of coding. IIUC, this is why 
Gnome3 has been rewritten from scratch, instead of repairing old Gnome2 code.

IOW, nobody will make this happen.
 
> > And Fedora
> > has a lot of Gnome3 dependencies, even if you do not install Gnome3
> > itself.
> 
> Such as?

Well, I'm still on F14 on this machine, but I doubt there is a serious 
difference in F15... Anyway, there is no need to look too much:

# yum remove libgnome
[snip lots of irrelevant stuff]
Removing:
 libgnome
Removing for dependencies:
 krb5-auth-dialog
 policycoreutils-gui
 system-config-lvm
 system-config-network

The above is on a F14 machine installed from a Live KDE spin (or maybe I 
dragged it in later when realizing I don't have the above stuff...).

So if you want a GUI for Kerberos, SELinux, LVM or network management, you 
depend on libgnome.

And if those packages do not depend on Gnome in F15 or F16, I'll be very 
happily surprised. Having a gnome-free install of Fedora is one of my dreams. 
;-)

Best, :-)
Marko