Developers responsibillity to Fedora Users

[Darryl L. Pierce]

On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 03:52:26PM +0100, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> > > > 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.
> > 
> > Nobody ever said software development was easy or without challenges.
> 
> My original statement was in response to what Terry Barnaby asked --- why 
> doesn't someone repackage the old Gnome2 and make it available in Fedora? And 
> my response was that it is not just up to rebuilding srpms, because that code 
> will conflict with current Fedora.

Right, and I agree it's not just a repackage-and-ship process.

> My whole point is that it takes way more work than just doing a rebuild, and 
> therefore is not feasible.

What's not feasible? It's not _easy_, and is going to require some
committed developers to work on it. But's hardly impossible: it's just
going to take someone to GSD.

> > > IOW, nobody will make this happen.
> > 
> > Then I think Kubler-Ross says you should accept things and move on.
> 
> Oh, I have absolutely no problem accepting the new-and-shiny Gnome3. :-) I'm a 
> happy KDE user since RedHat 6.2 days, and after the whole KDE4.0 bitching by 
> some number of people on this list some time ago, it's a certain satisfaction 
> to see the same thing happening to Gnome-lovers now. Some of those people have 
> been advocating Gnome as being much better than KDE back in the time of havoc, 
> and now the same thing is happening to them... ;-)
> 
> I just wonder if the same thing will happen to XFCE and LXDE in the future. 
> I'd love to see the reaction of the people then! ;-)

I'm of the same mind there. I was a KDE user for a long time and was
glad to have my boat rocked when 4 was released. After the initial
learning curve was overcome I was right back where I wanted to be with
getting my work done, which is the whole point of the computer in the
first place.

> > > 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. ;-)
> > 
> > Okay, then. So in the above 4 cases (not reall "a lot") I would say the
> > challenge is to keep them in sync with the newer (or older) libgnome.
> > Perhaps provide a compatibility layer?
> 
> I think it would be much wiser to abstract out the UI part of those packages 
> to make them compatible with Qt as well as GTK, and otherwise to remove any DE 
> dependence. Providing a compatibility layer or keeping them in sync with 
> libgnome would be patching up a wrong solution to the problem, not to mention 
> the wasted coding effort.

Well, a compatibility layer would be the foundation for abstracting out
the desktop GUI dependencies, isn't it? Once there's a layer that lets
the Gnome2-dependent apps talk to Gnome3, then it can be modified to
work with other GUI libraries, right?

-- 
Darryl L. Pierce, Sr. Software Engineer @ Red Hat, Inc.
Delivering value year after year.
Red Hat ranks #1 in value among software vendors.
http://www.redhat.com/promo/vendor/

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