GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode [LWN.net]

GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode

Posted Nov 23, 2012 7:18 UTC (Fri) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)
In reply to: GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode by ebassi
Parent article: GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode

seriously, if a distro ships an application without satisfying its dependencies,

This thread was explicitly about proprietary applications, which are usually not shipped by distributions.

(Log in to post comments)

GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode

Posted Nov 23, 2012 9:44 UTC (Fri) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link]

the libraries in question are still there. they didn't fell off the face of the earth, they are still in git, they still have tarballs, and they are still at the same level as they were before GNOME 3.0 was released.

GNOME didn't do anything, except say that nobody is working on those libraries any more, except for eventual security issues; patches coming from distributions have been folded back, whenever applicable, and releases have been made.

if you want to maintain old libraries, you're absolutely encouraged to do so: just ask for a Git account, or push clone on github/gitorious if you want to, and ask distributions to switch over to your tarballs.

if that's not to your satisfaction then I'm sorry: you have a profound issue with the whole "free software" thing.

GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode

Posted Nov 23, 2012 10:03 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Thank you for the condescension, just what I needed to brighten up my morning. I actually consider myself to be reasonably au fait with this whole free software thing. It paid my wages for quite a few years, and it might again in a few years time. Indeed, there's a small, but not insignificant, chance that you or your packets are a regular user of free software I have written / helped maintain. (And I am a regular, happy and grateful user of your software).

So thanks for that.

Note that I was *not* assigning blame anywhere, and I was not ranting. I was merely stating a fact: a good application disappeared from a common distro because of churn in libraries, and that the old libraries are difficult to build on that distro, at least using the packaging facilities of that distro. If stating quite objective facts on LWN about free software is akin to questioning and having profound issues with the whole basis for free software, then perhaps we're all on a quite shaky foundation.

As I've written here before, my view is the problem is a business one. In particular, the fact that it's impossible to pay the major employer of Linux desktop developers for support on the software I'd like to run on my desktop (i.e. software that isn't 5+ years old on average, but not sub-6-month old either). Further, even if they would take my money for that, that still leaves a good number of developers I depend on not owing me anything. I'd have to get support contracts with each of them.

Re fixing your problems yourself, it's not always possible to learn a codebase and figure out how to fix it within the space of the hours to a day you can afford to spend on fixing some random software problem. But I'll give the GNOME lib building another try and see what needs fixing.