Re: upstream vendors and why they can be really harmful

On Wed, Nov 07, 2012 at 08:58:55AM +1100, Brett wrote:
> Not to disparage the hard work by Antoine and others on Gnome and KDE, but
if upstream are going to entwine their code with non-standard OSs, then why
bother with them?

That _is_ precisely the question I asked on GNOME lists. I'm not ranting
about the fact that they started requiring systemd features, it's their
choice after all. Whining after it's done is pretty much useless. If you want
a project you like to go in a direction that you think is better, then you
need to get involved way sooner in the development process. Most of the time
people rant about GNOME's direction but are not even using GNOME themselves
or don't like it anyway.
My real concern was to know where this was going exactly so that I could make
a decision whether it would still make sense to keep working on it (which is
a huge work, trust me) or not.

It's not like it's the only Desktop available out there and I don't think it
particularly hurts us if it were to disapear from ports; but if other more
important projects (for us) follow the same direction, then it is getting
problematic.

> I use Joe's Window Manager, it compiles in less than a minute straight from
the sources with no patching or tweaking. I don't have semi-transparent
windowbars and I had to make a couple of tweaks so I could hear a "beep" when
I get an IM, apart from that, what can a "modern" window manager do that is
worth the some porter's pain (and extra 10-20% cpu consumption to run)
anyway?

My cpu is idle when I'm not doing anything under GNOME.
There are many reasons why a fully integrated point-and-click Desktop is
attractive to some people, but this is not the topic here.
 
> Stuff like X is a different matter, if upstream must be battled, I would
say send the troops to defend what is hard to do without, not what is easy to
do without.

Then gather your troups and go fight or provide code, because between KMS and
llvmpipe we are already way way behind... Out of the 10 machines I have at
home, only 1 has a fully supported X driver.
The main issue is that the BSD community is very small and as espie@
mentionned, developers already have no time on their hand so it's hard to get
yourself heard.

Let's be pragmatic, 99% of the work is made by Linux people with no !linux
developer/user being involved; why would they bother about portability if no
one around challenges them? As a member of the GNOME project I can tell you
that not everyone there is deaf or incompetent, and if you come with proper
arguments (and code) they will be more than happy to include it or change the
way they do things to accomodate to standards. Lennart is a different matter,
he made it clear he doesn't care about the rest of the ecosystem. But he is
just one guy and his lobbying works also because no one else is here to
challenge him. It's one thing to rant on mailing list and blobs...

-- 
Antoine