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Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway markClasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway markPosted Jan 25, 2013 18:58 UTC (Fri) by tetley80 (guest, #88691)In reply to: Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark by rahulsundaram Parent article: Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark
Sorry, but that's a gross misinterpretation at best, and attempt at rewriting history at worst. Labeling G3 as an "upgrade" is not in the same league as updating gcc 4.6 to 4.7, or going from Gnome 2.26 to 2.28, or going from kernel 3.4 to 3.5. In comparison to Gnome 2, Gnome 3 is closer to a rewrite, even if we only restrict ourselves to looking at the UI changes. This clearly indicates that G3 was a brand new component. This new component got insufficient testing before it was forced upon the Fedora community. If you can force a new component such as G3 to be the default, not applying the same standard to the Cinnamon desktop is disingenuous. This is further underlined by the fact that the "delta" between G3 and Cinnamon is much smaller than between G2 and G3. Moreover, the Gnome 3 shell can be considered a regression from a UI perspective, with Cinnamon aiming to fix that regression (while still using the underlying Gnome 3 components).
If we use the above logic, nobody will mind if we suddenly switch over to the Clang compiler (instead of gcc), without any wide testing in Fedora. After all, if people don't like it they can create their own gcc spin. While we're at it, how about we swap the Linux kernel to use one of the BSD kernels? Nobody will mind, as after all, there are tons of options. People can always create a Linux-kernel spin of Fedora. The point I'm making above is that Gnome 3 was an arbitrary choice of a default, without due testing of the proposed default by the wider Fedora community. It certainly wasn't a simple "upgrade".
(Log in to post comments)
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 25, 2013 19:15 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
It clearly wasn't arbitrary. There are people paid to do GNOME development in Fedora. That's not the case for any of the other desktops, including GNOME 2.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 25, 2013 19:30 UTC (Fri) by tetley80 (guest, #88691) [Link]
That's false. Red Hat is directly paying for Gnome 2 maintenance, via maintaining Gnome 2 in both RHEL 5 and RHEL 6.
Well then, the "paid employment" argument is awfully sounding like the main criterion for selecting Gnome 3 as the default in Fedora.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 25, 2013 19:44 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
Nobody is paying for GNOME 2 development in Fedora. GNOME 2 is maintained in RHEL, but for versions older than the last GNOME 2 that Fedora shipped. But yeah, shockingly, it turns out that "There are people paid to look after this in the distribution" is a good criterion to use when deciding what should be the default in the distribution.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 25, 2013 21:21 UTC (Fri) by tetley80 (guest, #88691) [Link] So then, is the "paid employment" a clearly codified and documented criterion that Fedora officially uses? If not, it indicates that non-technical reasons are being used underhandedly to make decisions on technical matters. Even if it was a documented criterion, wouldn't it amount to discrimination based on non-technical issues? Either way, this type of behavior is certainly not in the spirit of the Fedora community. It also amounts to letting people loose on a major every-day UI component and putting a blind eye to what they're doing, just because they're getting paid for it. It's all well and good to propose new things, but to implement major UI regressions is abusing the community's patience. This is yet more evidence towards the view that Fedora is simply an unstable testing ground for future RHEL releases.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 25, 2013 21:55 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
What's non-technical about it?
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 25, 2013 22:05 UTC (Fri) by tetley80 (guest, #88691) [Link]
The contribution of person X is more valuable than person Y, because person X happens to be employed by Z. Nevermind that it is possible for Y (or multiple instances of Y) to provide the same labor as X.
Technical reasons include: is software X more stable than software Y, or my favorite, does software X have more regressions than Y ?
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 25, 2013 22:21 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
No. The contribution of person X is more valuable than person Y because person X spends more time working on the code in question and has a direct incentive to fix bugs and integrate software in a timely manner.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 26, 2013 1:09 UTC (Sat) by ebiederm (subscriber, #35028) [Link]
Given that the regressions in the Gnome UI experience have not gotten better there seems to be a fundamental flaw in your argument.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 26, 2013 1:16 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
If you don't like the UI, just say so. Don't call them "regressions".
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 26, 2013 3:41 UTC (Sat) by hadrons123 (guest, #72126) [Link]
It is a 'regresssion', when you loose functionality.
Initially I was interested in gnome-shell and I am still using it but recently things started to disappear from components like nautilus.
Why do you think 'nemo' got accepted in fedora?
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 26, 2013 4:34 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Just to be clear, as long as there is someone willing to maintain a open source component, it can be in the Fedora repository. There is no overall authority deciding what should be 'accepted'. Why do you think there has been forks would be a more pertinent question.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 26, 2013 7:44 UTC (Sat) by hadrons123 (guest, #72126) [Link]
@rahul
Not all packages which are forked from existing components are accepted by FESCO. Would you accept a older forked gcc or linux-lts kernel accepted in fedora just becoz someone is interested in maintaining it?
Gnome components are forked so much becoz there is an audience for older versions and people are actively using it. New versions of nautilus should have more functions on top of old features, but instead calling it as unmaintainable and removing the features is not what users want. Now instead of nautilus 3.6, people are willing to stay with nautilus 3.4 with new name 'nemo'. Within a couple of years if the gnome project continue the tradition of removing the core features and thrust some feautres that the devs think is important, I am pretty sure there will complete fork of all the components.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 26, 2013 7:46 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
FESCO doesn't perform package review.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 26, 2013 16:52 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
"Not all packages which are forked from existing components are accepted by FESCO"
You don't seem to understand the package review process. FESCo is not involved. All it takes is one package maintainer to review and approve and it is typically upto him or her to determine packaging quality and only that. We don't typically ask the question why at all as part of the review process. Ours concern are usually limited to maintenance and sustainability. They can appeal to Fedora packaging committee to determine whether it conflicts with the packaging guidelines and in this case, there was a request to FPC and they determined that Cinnamon didn't conflict. The relevant packaging guidelines are at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:No_Bundled_Libra...
There is really nothing stopping an older version of GCC from going in and Fedora does that now and then for compatibility. Fedora repositories have a lot of forked components and they are accepted on a routine basis. If a forked version of GCC gets submitted for review, it takes just one maintainer to review and approve it unless someone objects and in that case, it is upto FPC and they might escalate all the way to FESCo or even Fedora Board but such instances are very rare.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 26, 2013 5:44 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
Changing from GNOME 3 to Cinnamon would result in a loss of functionality, as did the change from GNOME 1 to GNOME 2. How are you figuring out which transitions are worse than others?
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 26, 2013 5:41 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
Define "regression".
Regression Posted Jan 26, 2013 14:43 UTC (Sat) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
When something that used to work no longer does so.
One can claim that the product is now different and that you can't compare the old product with the new one (that conveniently uses the old product's name), but to the person thinking that they're getting an update of the same thing, it's a step backwards.
This means that when we try and put a modern distribution in front of people, instead of explaining how it is mostly the same (and thus what they are used to themselves) but better, we now have to explain why it is different and things that used to work no longer do so.
Frequent blog posts by people pretending to be brand strategists and visionaries don't actually placate user concerns because the users are mostly concerned with whether stuff does what they need it to, not whether the "positioning" of the software is right according to current market trends, or whatever.
After all, no amount of blogging can make something work again or even work in the first place.
Regression Posted Jan 26, 2013 15:38 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
Going from GNOME 1 to GNOME 2 meant that I could no longer set the tile background for launcher buttons. Would you class that as a regression?
Regression Posted Jan 26, 2013 16:37 UTC (Sat) by sorokin (subscriber, #88478) [Link] If someone complains about a feature missing it's a regression.If a feature is removed and somebody used it, you alienate your user. If people in GNOME cared about users they will never make something like G3. If people in Fedora cared about users they will never put G3 as default only because G3 is made by the same people as G2. That is the main difference between free and commercial software. If they alienate users they lose money. If GNOME people alienate users they don't care. They only thing they care about is a "brand presence".
Regression Posted Jan 26, 2013 17:09 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
So KDE 4 is a regression when compared to KDE 3?
Regression Posted Jan 26, 2013 18:10 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
To some, yes. That's why Trinity exists (and the semi-separate OpenSUSE KDE3 fork).
Regression Posted Jan 26, 2013 18:33 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
Regression's a subjective term?
Regression Posted Jan 26, 2013 19:19 UTC (Sat) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
No, a regression is a regression. Whether anybody cares or not, that's subjective.
And, whenever you remove a feature from a large project, no matter how meaningless or crappy, you will find somebody who cares.
Regression Posted Jan 26, 2013 20:54 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
Right. So "Regression" here isn't terribly meaningful - almost every update will change or remove some functionality in a way that annoys somebody. By this sense, changing from GNOME 3 to Cinnamon would be a regression. It's a term that doesn't add anything to the conversation, and people should stop using it.
Regression Posted Jan 26, 2013 21:18 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] By this sense, changing from GNOME 3 to Cinnamon would be a regression. No. If things is mostly the same but has different name people expect that some features will not be available. When something is billed as "pure upgrade" but it removes features - people become quite vocal. Is it fair? No. But that's life. Deal with it.
Regression Posted Jan 26, 2013 21:29 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
Someone defines the term, I explicitly say that I'm using that definition of the term, and then you tell me that I'm wrong? How about disagreeing with the definition, instead?
Regression Posted Jan 27, 2013 16:16 UTC (Sun) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
We can agree that cinnamon has fewer regressions, right? And that they are spending a lot of time reducing potential regressions that their users might experience?
Sounds like a meaningful conversation to me. Where's the confusion?
Regression Posted Jan 28, 2013 22:51 UTC (Mon) by sorokin (subscriber, #88478) [Link]
> almost every update will change or remove some functionality in a way that annoys somebody
In GNOME -- yes. In other reasonable projects that is simple not true. I would say that for most projects that is not true.
Regression Posted Jan 26, 2013 16:56 UTC (Sat) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
Did it still have launcher buttons?
You can make the case that the lack of a gold exhaust pipe on a hypothetical electric car - let's call it the Ford Luxury - is not a regression since its non-electric predecessor - also called the Ford Luxury - needed such a thing, whereas no-one is really going to miss it on the electric model. The argument in such cases is that technology has made something obsolete and thus the need to choose between, say, gold and steel has been eliminated.
The problem is that the view (or excuse) that technology has made something obsolete is brought out far too often. GNOME 2 won't let you do something that GNOME 1 did? It's because it's all better, that's why! When the developers famously closed bugs against GNOME 1 because GNOME 2 was new and different (http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html), they illustrated precisely this phenomenon.
People want the benefit of brand recognition but also the benefit of not having their current product compared to the previous one, even though having the same name on the product is inevitably going to invite such comparisons. If you want to enjoy the former benefit, you have to relinquish the latter.
Regression Posted Jan 26, 2013 17:10 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
Yes, it still had launcher buttons.
Regression Posted Jan 27, 2013 15:44 UTC (Sun) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
Did anyone miss the removed feature? If not, maybe it's not really a regression. If they did ("My launcher buttons look awful now - why did they change this?") then one can discuss whether it's a minor regression or not.
Perhaps launcher buttons couldn't be transparent before and the background setting was a workaround that was made obsolete, just like the absence of an exhaust pipe on a hypothetical car whose predecessor required one. Since the result is almost completely superior, there's little reason to complain about it, but that almost certainly cannot be said for many consequences of these big product upgrades.
Regression Posted Jan 27, 2013 16:27 UTC (Sun) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
So we've gone from a regression being something that no longer works to something that no longer works and which nobody really misses, maybe. And it's probably only a minor one. Which sounds awfully like they're subjective, and then we're just back to "I don't like these changes". Why not just say that you don't like the changes, rather than pretending that there's been a truly objective analysis?
Regression Posted Jan 27, 2013 17:52 UTC (Sun) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
No, I conceded that if a feature goes away and nobody notices, you don't have to take a position on it. It's still a regression, but nobody really cares, and you can argue that in the grand scheme of things, no significant feature has fallen off the feature list.
I also noted that if a feature goes away because it is obsolete - to take an ancient example that once applied to some desktop systems, you don't have to allocate memory manually to a process because the system now does that for you - you can ignore the regression because nothing that anyone was doing before that they can no longer do now (say, allocate a process size of N) is anything they still need to be able to do (because the system will give the process N if it asks for it). Since there is no longer any benefit in even being able to do those obsolete things, there's no general functional regression (you can still run that process).
None of this has anything to do with whether I "like the changes". The issue I have is the way that people deny the experiences of the users by playing games with definitions of what the system was and is, as if the users were supposed to care more about the brand gymnastics than the features actually being delivered.
Regression Posted Jan 28, 2013 14:04 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
Yes Matthew. You're a very smart person and you can successfully outmanoeuvre people by playing semantic games without ever having to lower yourself to making meaningful points.
Clearly, everything you say is therefore correct. It must be wonderful to know that you are so much better at everything than anyone else. I hope you enjoy your future career in law, and wish you all the best.
Regression Posted Jan 28, 2013 16:05 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
The meaningful point is that "This UI has regressions and therefore should never have been made the default" is a false claim to a measurable change in quality and an implication that, as a result, the choice was irrational. People should stick to "It breaks my workflow" or "I find this change objectionable for some other reason", which are arguments that can lead to actual discussions about whether the improvements to other people's workflow outweigh that, or whether there would be some way to tweak the behaviour such that a specific usecase becomes practical without compromising any other design decisions. Bringing up "regression" shuts that opportunity off, because we all know that regressions are unarguably bad and need to be fixed immediately. People should say what they mean rather than throw around terms they can't even meaningfully define.
Regression Posted Jan 28, 2013 16:17 UTC (Mon) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link]
> People should say what they mean rather than throw around terms they can't even meaningfully define.
With Gnome 2 I was able to control my CPU governors with a graphical applet.
For me it's simply a regression.
Regression Posted Jan 28, 2013 16:40 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
There's no "For me". A regression is a regression. With GNOME 1 I used to be able to set the background to launcher tiles. With GNOME 2 I couldn't. Is this a regression? When defining regression as "Something that used to be possible is no longer possible", yes. Do I care? No. Did anybody? Probably, but it was 10 years ago and they've probably got over it.
Regression Posted Jan 28, 2013 17:02 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]
>With Gnome 2 I was able to control my CPU governors with a graphical applet.
>With Gnone 3 there is no applet and I can't control my CPU governors through the GUI.
Perhaps there isn't an "applet" but there is an extension, available through the extensions.gnome.org website.
Regression Posted Jan 28, 2013 18:52 UTC (Mon) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link]
> Perhaps there isn't an "applet" but there is an extension, available through the extensions.gnome.org website.
You're right. The extension is here : https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/444/cpu-freq/
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 26, 2013 20:31 UTC (Sat) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link]
Change that breaks user workflow.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 27, 2013 21:38 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]
> Change that breaks user workflow.
Here's the problem with that.
Pretty much any change (short of a crash fix) will qualify as breaking someone's workflow -- ie "it's different than what I'm used to"
It's been said many times over in this thread; nobody's forcing you to update anything. Your three-year-old Fedora/OSX/Windows/DOS/whatever installation works as well (and identically) today as the day it was released. Heck, go with something like RHEL and it'll be continually supported for a decade.
But don't complain about it lacking $randomfeature, because in the real world nothing is independent.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 28, 2013 7:21 UTC (Mon) by ebiederm (subscriber, #35028) [Link]
The command line in unix has decades of updates and even several complete reimplementations of various commands without breaking a persons muscle memory or workflow.
It is a cop out to say that you can't have that in other UIs.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 28, 2013 7:40 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
Oh come on. Try doing anything vaguely advanced with GNU utilities and then use the same commandline on BSD. Try using ifconfig syntax with ip. tar has had several incompatible changes in option symantics.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 25, 2013 22:14 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
That's not valid logical argument. Taking in all the relevant information including the size and availability of the maintainership of a code base are reasons for making distribution decisions. It is not "underhanded" to make rational decisions nor is it necessary to thow up the bureaucratic smoke screen about "documented criterion" as if decision making is about some mechanistic following of a pre-written rule book. You can take all of this as just more evidence to service your prejudices or you can try to better understand the world around you and why things happen, the choice is yours.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 25, 2013 22:50 UTC (Fri) by tetley80 (guest, #88691) [Link]
I can understand the need for flexibility, but the use of a "documented criterion" cannot be simply dismissed as "bureaucratic". If one does not have good and well thought basis for making decisions, then one gets arbitrary decisions which can lead to strife, such as UI regressions. If "documented criterions" did not work, nations wouldn't have laws and constitutions. There is obviously a trade-off between codification and flexibility. However, in this case it is my strong opinion that too much flexibility in the UI area has provided a disservice to the Fedora community.
A nice condescending comment. I do not wish for this discussion to degenerate into a flame fest, so I will not entertain this further.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 25, 2013 23:16 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
"UI regressions"
You keep using that phrase as if it means something other than "I don't like this UI", but I don't know what.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 30, 2013 0:04 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
I think you've participated in enough discussions here on LWN, including with myself, that actually explained what that meant. And I see you keep repeating this "question" as if it was never answered.
You know, stuff like this. Changing workspaces took one mouse click before and one view change (using GUI). Now it takes several, including a lot more mouse travel. Desktop visibility is zero, which was not the case before. The amount of pixels that change when working remotely using VNC has been significantly increased, which makes things even slower over poor links. It is practicality impossible to move items on the panel or define new panels using techniques available for at least two decades. Etc.
The _measurable_ stuff.
As I pointed out numerous times, Gnome 3 overview is essentially an implementation of RFC1925(6). That in itself is a regression, because everything is one step further away.
Unfortunately, nobody in Gnome development team is brave enough to acknowledge any of these facts. Instead, we are getting an Ultralite Gnome Classic, which just looks a bit like "classic", but it can't do most of the stuff that was possible before.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 30, 2013 8:49 UTC (Wed) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
"brave enough to ack that"
Learned loaded question in another article :)
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Feb 2, 2013 3:46 UTC (Sat) by fandingo (subscriber, #67019) [Link] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/464/workspacebar/ took two minutes to find and two clicks to install. That seems to completely alleviate your workspace problem.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 26, 2013 20:40 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
I may be condescending but while I don't care for GNOME 3 Shell either I think that stating so plainly is sufficient, one doesn't need to go fishing for procedural reasons to reinforce ones opinion. I don't think you can successfully argue that having available, dedicated resources for maintaining a software project shouldn't be a criteria for a distribution accepting it and making it part of the default, whether this is written in a procedural manual or not.
If you don't like GNOME 3 Shell just stand up and say so, no need to beat around the bush.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 25, 2013 19:16 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Your reasoning doesn't make sense. You claim that GNOME 2 is not dead upstream because there is a fork but the presence of the fork doesn't say anything about GNOME 2 itself and the fork didn't exist when Fedora switched to GNOME 3. GNOME 3 is certainly an upgrade to GNOME 2 in the same way that KDE 4 is an upgrade to KDE 3 and Fedora 18 installer is an upgrade to Fedora 17 installer. You might not like that upgrade but arguing that they shouldn't be considered an upgrade despite sharing a lot of the same components and put up by the same project is just silly. There was a GNOME 3 feature proposal btw which was accepted by Fedora engineering steering committee.
If you want to propose a switch by default to Clang, it will go through the same feature proposal as Cinnamon and must have a very robust rationale for doing so. So I am afraid I don't see your point at all. Nobody is using any force to make you install Fedora or even if you chose Fedora to force you to install GNOME.
As we move forward, we continue to make more choices available and in fact, one of the accepted features for Fedora 19 is to bring in Enlightenment 17. I am working on that.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 25, 2013 19:44 UTC (Fri) by tetley80 (guest, #88691) [Link]
For all intents and purposes, MATE is Gnome 2. Furthermore, Red Hat is still maintaining Gnome 2 in RHEL 6. As such, Gnome 2 is far from dead.
You are of course correct in the above observation. However, this is boiling down to a chicken and egg argument (pardon the unintended pun). MATE probably wouldn't exist if Gnome 3 didn't have such massive UI changes. If Gnome 3 was more evolutionary, or had built in options to let people choose which new UI elements to use, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
The Fedora review process is hence broken, given the amount of fall out that the UI changes in Gnome 3 have generated. It strongly suggests the engineering steering committee has a very cavalier attitude when it comes to UI regressions.
This is consistent with a cop out. You have responsibility to the Fedora community, and instead of admitting that the Gnome 3 shell UI is a point of pain for many in the Fedora community, you are in effect telling them to go away.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 25, 2013 20:42 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
GNOME 2 *upstream* is dead and GNOME 3 was that natural upgrade path for Fedora just like the upgrade from KDE 3 to KDE 4 or any other new upstream release. MATE and Cinnamon are more recent projects and they are available in the repo if you prefer them.
"You have responsibility to the Fedora community, and instead of admitting that the Gnome 3 shell UI is a point of pain for many in the Fedora community, you are in effect telling them to go away"
Now, you are being intentionally dishonest. I told you explicitly that I am working on integrating Enlightenment and I helped review Cinnamon as well. So no, I am not telling them to go away but use whatever they prefer and I am working on making those choices available.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 25, 2013 21:59 UTC (Fri) by tetley80 (guest, #88691) [Link]
So on one hand we have a major UI regression in a component that has worked fine for years, and on the other hand we're being told that this regression doesn't matter because of the many choices we have? Okay, let's follow this through. Gnome 2 used to be a first class citizen in Fedora. It has been replaced (not "upgraded") by a completely different user interface, known as the Gnome 3 shell. Packages such as Cinnamon are closer to the Gnome 2 UI, yet they're second class citizens (ie. I need to manually install them in F17/F18, or explicitly do a network install in F18). Yes, technically the choices are there, but you need to dig to find them. Summary: "You liked ABC? Sorry, you can't have it anymore. Here's DEF instead. Oh, you don't like that? Well, we have GHI which is kind of like ABC, but you'll have to find it yourself. Have fun!" If Fedora is serious about "making choices available", Cinnamon should be elevated to be one of the main options (in the installer) for the user interface, while also being present on the _default_ installation media. None of this separate "spin" nonsense. While this might be a workable solution, it's also a type of bug fix. It would be far more productive to prevent these kind of UI interface regressions in the future.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 25, 2013 22:12 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
You can easily install MATE which you claimed is equivalent to GNOME 2 so "ABC" is available just fine and no digging requires since is well advertised and widely documented.
sudo yum install @mate-desktop
The "default" download is a live image cannot hold all the different desktop environments due to size constraints and this is the reason we have multiple options at http://spins.fedoraproject.org. I am not sure what more you want honestly. You seem to be arguing for the sake of it.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 25, 2013 23:03 UTC (Fri) by tetley80 (guest, #88691) [Link]
The discussion started off about Cinnamon being the default UI for Fedora, so let's not fuzzify the issue by stating that the MATE desktop takes up too much space. Given all the pain about the Gnome 3 UI, Cinnamon provides a more traditional user interface, while still using Gnome 3 components. Cinnamon should be a first class citizen in Fedora (along with Gnome 3), and be on the default install media, not relegated to a separate spin. In contrast to MATE, Cinnamon requires relatively little space. It can be considered as an addon to Gnome 3, not a replacement like MATE. This discussion is starting to go around in circles, so I'll leave it here.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 26, 2013 1:22 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
I bought up MATE because you claimed that the equivalent doesn't exist and Fedora isn't providing the choices when it is demonstrably clear that there are multiple alternatives to suit everyone's personal preferences. I don't see why a single yum install cinnamon/ gnome-classic-session in Fedora 19 or the gui equivalent of checking a tick-box is that hard for anyone. You seem to want to insert your personal preference into the default image as an addition and claim that even a different image with your personal preference as a default isn't sufficient and I don't think you have provided any realistic justification for that.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 27, 2013 13:06 UTC (Sun) by deepfire (subscriber, #26138) [Link]
> You seem to want to insert your personal preference
Sorry for this bit of judgementality, but I used to regard you as
The "personal" preference sticker you slap on tetley80's words
Tread carefully -- the project you represent can handle only so much self-inflicted alienation.
Listen.. Can you hear it? The sound of mindshare going away?
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 27, 2013 15:06 UTC (Sun) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 27, 2013 15:06 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
I just represent myself and "personal preference" is a very neutral word. Like I said, you might not like something and that's fine but claiming that choices aren't available unless it is in the default image is hardly reasonable.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 26, 2013 0:53 UTC (Sat) by misc (subscriber, #73730) [Link]
> Furthermore, Red Hat is still maintaining Gnome 2 in RHEL 6.
So on one comment, you say that the fact that people are paid to work on a software should not be taken in account, and yet, you now use the same exact argument to say that since people are paid to keep gnome 2 aline, then it is not dead and so should be considered.
Can I recommend a little bit of self consistency ?
And frankly, for people wanting gnome 2, there is RHEL, SLES ( around 50$ per year ), or for the one who cannot afford this either due to volume or to any reason, there is Centos, Scientific Linux, etc.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 26, 2013 17:06 UTC (Sat) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
Self-consistency doesn't come into it here. By noting that people are paid by Red Hat to maintain GNOME 2, it indulges and then demolishes the argument that the existence of paid maintainers must be the factor that determines inclusion in Fedora (subject to argument about the relationship between Fedora and RHEL).
Of course, Red Hat may be eager to stop having to maintain GNOME 2, and the real reason may be that the existence of external paid developers is what really decides whether something is included in any of the company's products - a matter of not having to bear all the load internally - plus the level of enthusiasm for GNOME 3 amongst internal developers compared to that for GNOME 2, but I'd also hope that the users of the company's products might also get some say (other than voting with their feet, of course).
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 26, 2013 20:49 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
It doesn't demolish anything really. Fedora is not a Red Hat product and Red Hat maintains an older version of GNOME 2 than what was included in Fedora when it was replaced by GNOME 3. Red Hat is willing to put in that additional resources to maintain a commercial product but those same resources are not available for Fedora. It isn't about external paid developers as such since majority of the GNOME developers are from Red Hat in the first place but paid development is part of how you evaluate sustainability of the project. Maintaining a older version has a significant cost and that is not the focus of Fedora. All of this should really be obvious I think.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 29, 2013 17:09 UTC (Tue) by hadrons123 (guest, #72126) [Link]
Fedora is not a Red Hat product
Is it so?
That's an interesting piece of information to know from you.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 29, 2013 17:56 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
If you have ever read the original announcement of Fedora or ever visited the about section in http://fedoraproject.org or heck if you just see the domain name, you would have known this about 8 or so years back.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 30, 2013 15:14 UTC (Wed) by hadrons123 (guest, #72126) [Link]
I do know that fedora is a red hat sponsored community product, but you are asking us to believe that red hat has no role in what packages gets in and out of fedora, specifically for example cinnamon or systemd. Fedora Cinnamon package review was waiting for more than 6 months citing various reasons and finally it was uploaded. I do appreciate and thank your effort in getting cinnamon in to the official repos, but you have to admit that there was so much hesitation from other people in Fedora camp.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 30, 2013 15:48 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
You have shifted your points but yes, Red Hat has zero role in Cinnamon or systemd getting into Fedora. You don't have to take my word for it. The review process is entirely public.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=771252
It was submitted by a volunteer, Leigh Scott and I took up the review voluntarily.The major opposition came from another volunteer, Christoph Wickert who was concerned about sustainability and violation of packaging guidelines regarding forks and we discussed it with the packaging committee and it was eventually approved by another volunteer, Dan Mashal. The delay was partly my fault since I took up the review and didn't finish it up quickly since I was focusing on release specific tasks at that time and we also had to get the packaging committee approval and the reviews themselves took time.
systemd was submitted by me and approved by another volunteer.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=598299
It became the default after approval by FESCo (a fully elected body btw) which did delay it by one release despite having a number of Red Hat employees in it. So if you are looking for favoritism you have picked the wrong examples. Are there other packages submitted by Red Hat employees as part of the job? yes but the important point is that the process is not designed to be any different regardless of who you work for.
Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark Posted Jan 25, 2013 19:22 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> That's false reasoning from two points of view. (i) G2 is not dead upstream, as the MATE desktop is maintaining the G2 branch.
G2 didn't '_die_' upstream. Gnome released a new version of the desktop. The Gnome 2 developers became Gnome 3 developers. All the GTK libs and everything else that applications need to be backwards compatible still exists and have had new stable releases.
Mate is a fork of Gnome 2 and didn't exist until much more recently then Fedora following the upgrade path away from Gnome 2. It's a _NEW_ project.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Gnome3
Targeted release: Fedora 15
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MATE_(desktop_environment)
Initial release August 19, 2011; 16 months ago
And it didn't make it into Fedora until the Fedora 18.
If you want to get all weepy over this stuff then that's fine, but at least don't just make random crap up.
> Labeling G3 as an "upgrade" is not in the same league as updating gcc 4.6 to 4.7, or going from Gnome 2.26 to 2.28, or going from kernel 3.4 to 3.5.
It's in the same league as going from 2.4 kernel to 2.6 kernel.
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