The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 0:24 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience by sramkrishna
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Volunteers for what? Having people reinvent the wheel just to keep them busy is possibly the worst idea ever. Think about it.

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The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 5:35 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (4 responses)

Volunteers to invent spokes, vulcanized rubber, and all sorts of other improvements. You're welcome to continue using your stone wheels as long as you'd like.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 9:56 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (3 responses)

Great, now instead of inventing paper or penicillin, let's just reinvent our wheels every five years, just because. Next iteration we will do them squared, on the basis that:

* they are more compact and easy to store.
* people are great a handling square things, they do not roll away by mistake.
* they are more beautiful.
* they *are* more *beautiful*.
* Did I mention square is more beautiful?

Don't mention that old roads will not adapt very well to those new wheels, but hey, it's all in the name of progress.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 22:12 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (2 responses)

How lame. I'm sorry I paid any attention to you.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 1:17 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (1 responses)

No, lame is using the interests of volunteers to excuse a bad technical decision, that is, throwing out the window all experience gained with a currently working environment, all in the pursuit of some questionable usability nirvana.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for improvement, but I seriously object to two things:
1. the mentality that once something is done, it's dead. Not. It's done. Most software projects should aim at being done some day, at least the parts others have to rely upon. That's what originated my initial post.
2. the way Gnome has chosen to release Shell. Make a new point zero release and rush a half baked idea with a half baked implementation. And make it mandatory! What's that familiar smell? Oh, yes! smells like KDE4 all over again! Why would it be so difficult to maintain the current, working, environment for the (millions!) of current users, and give the radically new stuff as an option for the adventurous?

But I guess they will make the same mistake again, who is going to test it if it's not mandatory, anyway? Excuse my lameness, but I have been through all this before, and it was not pretty.

All this would be moot, though, if Gnome tried to finish something. But can Gnome 2 be considered "done"? Nope, it was never written with that in mind. There are piles of bugs that will *never* get a fix, because in the minds of those developers Gnome 2 is not mature, but deprecated.

Of course, I may equally well be wrong. It happens to me all the time.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 3:23 UTC (Thu) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]

As usual, Jamie Zawinski had something to say about this years ago...

http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

His choice of language and attack vector aside, many people have written about this kind of problem, for a long time now. And I don't mean GNOME, I mean the general problem of never really getting to a finish state.

Jon.