GNOME 2.19.1 released [LWN.net]

GNOME 2.19.1 released

Posted Apr 28, 2007 4:08 UTC (Sat) by tetromino (subscriber, #33846)
In reply to: GNOME 2.19.1 released by jimmybgood
Parent article: GNOME 2.19.1 released

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).

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