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Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway markClasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway markPosted Jan 25, 2013 19:30 UTC (Fri) by tetley80 (guest, #88691)In reply to: Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark by mjg59 Parent article: Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark
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.
(Log in to post comments)
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.
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