GNOME 2.19.1 released [LWN.net]

GNOME 2.19.1 released

Posted Apr 27, 2007 7:27 UTC (Fri) by jimmybgood (guest, #26142)
Parent article: GNOME 2.19.1 released

Many folks mentioned that there was little change from v 2.14 to v 2.18. Well, I sure noticed a difference - more useless features and resource sucking daemons - cruft - bloat and more cruft. Having listened to the comments, I was taken quite unprepared for the massive increase in footprint.

If 2.19 has any exciting new features, I would be thrilled if they were modules or plugins. I don't expect that to be the case, though. I guess they're doing the right thing. I reviewed their human interface design research, and it clearly shows that all end users want every imaginable feature all at once.

Mozilla has extensions and plugins. Apache is modular. Xmms is modular. Gnome without gconf or the absurdly insecure avahi would be barely tolerable. Why can't gnome be modular? The only new feature I want is some way to run gnome without so many features.

I'm surprised they're adding new documentation as the same research also shows that no one has ever read any of the gnome documentation. Just to be a bad boy, I took a peek anyway. It went something like, "To view in fullscreen mode, select View - > Fullscreen".

Why would anyone need more than one translation? And why wouldn't gnome developers design away the need for most translations? Few people even use the trash facility. The icon is a trash basket. Do we really need to use the word trash? Or translate it into 246 languages?

When I right-click on trash, I can select opening or browsing. Is there a difference? I can rename an icon that doesn't need a name. I can stretch it, but I can't imagine why I would want to. I can select "Properties" which again gives me the opportunity to rename the icon. It lists the contents as "nothing", the location as "on the desktop", the volume, free space and modified as "unknown" and I can write notes like "This is a trash icon." When I click on help, I get a pop-up saying "There was an error displaying help."

I've never seen anyone make any use of any of this and I can't imagine why anyone would want to, let alone why they would want translations of all that nonsense. I admit I felt a little satisfaction at the error popup, but then I realized that soon the busy maintainers at Debian will close the loop hole and force me to install the gnome user-guide in order to run gnome at all.

If anyone is still reading, compare this vague bag of hype with the announcement four articles below. Oh yeah, the Linux kernel - that's modular, too. Don't you find it refreshing to read the candid assessment of the features and changes of the new kernel release?

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GNOME 2.19.1 released

Posted Apr 27, 2007 16:16 UTC (Fri) by tetromino (subscriber, #33846) [Link]

On the (unlikely) assumption that you are actually serious:

> I was taken quite unprepared for the massive increase in footprint.
If by "increase in footprint" you mean "ongoing optimization work that makes Gnome apps faster and use less memory with every release for the past couple of years", then yes.
> absurdly insecure avahi
AFAIK Avahi has had only 1 code execution vulnerability in the history of the project - and it was a local code execution vuln. It did have a few DoS and spoofing issues though.
> Why can't gnome be modular?
Gnome is extremely modular. If you only want gedit, you don't need to install evolution-data-server. If you don't like metacity, you can replace it with a number of other window managers. If you hate avahi, you can compile gnome-vfs without avahi support.
> The only new feature I want is some way to run gnome without so many features.
If your distro doesn't support a modular installation of Gnome, that's your distro's problem. You can always compile only the parts that you need by yourself - in other words, it's the same situation as with the Linux kernel.
> Why would anyone need more than one translation?
Because not all of your users necessarily speak the same language.
> The icon is a trash basket. Do we really need to use the word trash?
Looks like you don't know any blind people.
> When I right-click on trash, I can select opening or browsing. Is there a difference?
"Open" opens Nautilus in default mode (i.e. spatial, unless you use Ubuntu) and "Browse" opens Nautilus in browser mode.
> I can stretch it, but I can't imagine why I would want to.
A guy I know has a bunch of icons (for documents and applications) on his Gnome desktop. He stretches the icons of the things he uses frequently, and shrinks the icons he only needs to click on rare occasions.
> It lists the contents as "nothing", the location as "on the desktop", the volume, free space and modified as "unknown"
looks like a bug (or at least a missing feature), you should report it
> I've never seen anyone make any use of any of this and I can't imagine why anyone would want to
I've never seen anyone make use of IPv6, does that mean no-one would want to?
> I admit I felt a little satisfaction at the error popup
So other people's mistakes give you satisfaction - interesting. Do you laugh at car crashes?
> Don't you find it refreshing to read the candid assessment of the features and changes of the new kernel release?

That's the one point I agree with you - if you don't follow planet.gnome.org and planet.freedesktop.org, it's hard to keep track of what's going on in Gnome development. Gnome's official announcements can be pretty useless.

GNOME 2.19.1 released

Posted Apr 27, 2007 22:07 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Hilarious.

At one point or the other in Using gnome I've replaced...

nautilus,
metacity,
gnome-panel,
totem,
gnome-terminal,
and pretty much any other assorted-doo-dads with something I thought worked better at the time.

It's very modular. Out of KDE, Windows, Os X, or any other sort of desktop environment it's about as modular as anybody has done so far.

And then there is XFCE, which pretty much can be summed up as 'Gnome-lite', which a lot of people consider 'Gnome-done-right'.

Avahi itself is pretty kick-ass. I like it a lot. The only downside is that it lacks a lot of scripts needed to launch this or that service it detects, but they aren't very difficult to make.

It was very amusing to go to the airport and have somebody else's SSH service notification pop up on my desktop. Also It's funny when my neighboor's 'Itune' service pops up time to time over wireless.

And if you don't like the gconf editor, I suppose you can do it yourself.

.gconfd/ all XML text files. Nothing going to slow you down there. Except lack of documentation on what a lot of the options are.

I think that is probably one of the most serious shortcommings of Gnome is lack of documentation sometimes.

GNOME 2.19.1 released

Posted Apr 28, 2007 2:47 UTC (Sat) by jimmybgood (guest, #26142) [Link]

First of all, I don't use Gnome, but I will admit that it is the easiest desktop to provide for my users. I was indeed trying to be acerbically humorous, but I am also serious about my suggestions.

1) Maybe we need two, three or more translations, but we don't need all of them. You don't have to compile all the locales - just the ones you choose. How about having translation selection and DOWNLOAD as part of the desktop setup?

2) My objection to gconf is partly the xml files. All too often, due to lack of documentation (which I actually _do_ read), the only way to find out configuration options is to read the xml, an ugly and unpleasant task.

My major objection, though, is the gconf daemon. Most newbies are startled by the instant changes. They expect to select and then apply. Few people want and none need a process that eats up memory, cpu and resources by continuously checking for configuration changes. Whatever the gconf daemon does could be done by clicking on an "Apply" button.

I like the gconf-editor.

3) Except for Slackware, Linux distributions require all shared library dependencies to be resolved. The number and variety of packages dragged in as a result can be astonishing. I seem to recall selecting a package to add a volume control applet to the gnome panel and being given a list of package dependencies that would take up more space than an entire NetBSD (without X) distro and included support for firewire audio breakout devices.

My suggestion for a modular/plug-in architecture was intended to refer to a way of breaking this chain of dependencies. For example, gnome-vfs would have a plug-in interface, so the plug-ins would have the shared library dependencies rather than gnome-vfs itself. This would make it allow distros to provide the broadest support possible, without requiring all possible shared libraries.

I know this would be quite a challenge for gnome to implement, but it would be much more likely to get me excited about gnome than the announcement we're commenting on.

GNOME 2.19.1 released

Posted Apr 28, 2007 4:08 UTC (Sat) by tetromino (subscriber, #33846) [Link]

1) Good point, there is no good reason to not have an option to install translations independently. I periodically use localepurge to keep the locales I never use off my systems.

2) gconf-editor makes editing the config file (and more importantly, figuring out what each option means) a delightful and pleasant task.

Gconf daemon is used, first, to prevent the race conditions that would inevitably occur if every program could read/write desktop environment config files on its own. Think of it as a .lock on steroids. And secondly, using gconfd instead of directly reading config files allows you to choose a different storage backend (e.g. LDAP). In practice, gconfd performance is not bad; on the machine I am sitting at, in 4 days, it used up less than 2 minutes of CPU.

As for instant-apply: different desktop environments make different choices here. In Windows and KDE, you need to click "apply" to apply a change; in Gnome, the change is instantaneous. I personally don't care which behavior is used as long as it's consistent, but some people are extremely passionate about the subject.

3) One way to address shared library dependencies is with a reliable IPC mechanism that resolves at runtime - for example, DBus, which Gnome apps are increasingly relying on to move data.

A second way is using plugins. Just about every gnome package (including gnome-vfs, which you complain about - have a look in /usr/lib/gnome-vfs-2.0/modules) that could benefit from plugins does use a plugin interface. Of course, if your distro forces you to install all the possible gnome-vfs plugins along with the gnome-vfs library, that's hardly Gnome's fault...

The third way is compile-time options. The kernel's flexibility largely comes from compile-time options; Gnome also allows you to turn many optional dependencies off, but to do that, you need to recompile manually (or run Gentoo).

GNOME 2.19.1 released

Posted Apr 28, 2007 21:32 UTC (Sat) by eklitzke (subscriber, #36426) [Link]

With respect to localization, it is done in Gnome the same way that it is done with all the other linux software you use -- localizations are installed as .po files, and if you only use English they don't do anything other than take up disk space. And at least on my distribution (Ubuntu), the only localization that is installed by default is the one you selected at install time. Additional localizations are installed as language-pack-gnome-foo, meaning that if you only selected English during the install you only have English on your system, and if you want to get another language it's easy to do so.

With respect to gconf, I think that XML is a pretty good choice. It's true that it isn't as accessible as other formats to people who aren't familiar with XML syntax, but it's certainly standardized, and there are a lot of highly optimized libraries for parsing and generating XML, which makes it fairly fast. As far as instantaneous changes are concerned, this is a change that has also been made in OS X and some other software (I think Mozilla does this now). It is based on HCI studies that have shown this to be a more intuitive interface. I admit that when I first came across this behavior I didn't like it much, but having used it for some time I can say that I do think it is an improvement over the old Apply button behavior. Also, gconfd does _not_ continuously poll for changes; if you aren't making configuration changes it uses essentially no resources (other than the small memory footprint).

Right now Gnome is extremely modular, but to make changes you need to do so at compile time. It would be interesting to see a plugin architecture that made it easier to install pre-compiled binaries that had less dependencies, but I'd imagine that it would be difficult to do so without fattening the binaries themselves. If you have a good idea for a way to improve the dependency system in Gnome, you should write to the Gnome mailing lists or become active on bugzilla ;-)