Quotes of the week

[Posted May 18, 2011 by corbet]

To a first approximation, when someone says "Lightweight" what they mean is "I don't understand the problems that the alternative solves".

-- Matthew Garrett

It's obvious to anyone with any sense of orthogonality that the Perl 5 smart match operator is anything but smart. It is clever, but not smart. And it's obvious to anyone who's actually tried to use given that it is at best an incredibly awkward graft onto Perl 5, offering false hope of simplification but actually being more of a lateral arabesque to a different kind of complexity.

-- Chip Salzenberg

This is a huge reason why so many people dislike GNOME 3. Instead of getting used to how it works, they complain that it's not exactly how they're used to using it. Many people have approached it with an open mind and, for the most part, enjoy it very much. If we enjoy it, then GNOME Shell has to be at least somewhat good, yes? Just because you do not see it as so does not make it bad.

-- Ryan Peters

The future of GNOME is as a Linux based OS. It is harmful to pretend that you are writing the OS core to work on any number of different kernels, user space subsystem combinations, and core libraries.... Kernels just aren't that interesting. Linux isn't an OS. Now it is our job to try to build one - finally. Let's do it. I think the time has come for GNOME to embrace Linux a bit more boldly.

-- William Jon McCann

I'll call it Josselin's law: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Ulrich Drepper approaches 1.".

-- Lennart Poettering

Ryan Peters snippet that highlights typical GNOME dev. attitude

Posted May 19, 2011 15:37 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (6 responses)

Ryan Peters wrote: We wouldn't do that *if they weren't wrong*.

(in response to someone complaining that GNOME devs were always telling users they were wrong.)

Ryan Peters snippet that highlights typical GNOME dev. attitude

Posted May 22, 2011 15:21 UTC (Sun) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link] (5 responses)

Ryan Peters is not a GNOME developer, contributor or even a translator, as far as I can tell. (At least, not yet.) He's filed a few bugs. I'm not sure why his quote appears here other than to use a flamebait. For future reference, someone continually posting to the gnome-shell list does not indicate their association with the project. Actually, since the signal-to-noise ratio on the gnome-shell list has gotten so bad that even its developers can't use it effectively, any prolific poster there is almost certainly not speaking for the project.

All this page's editor had to do was to ask our bugzilla about his email address:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?emailreporter2=1;q...

Ryan Peters snippet that highlights typical GNOME dev. attitude

Posted May 22, 2011 15:31 UTC (Sun) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (1 responses)

So posting a quote from somebody saying "try it with an open mind and you may come to like it even though it's different from the environment you're used to" is now flamebait?

Ryan Peters snippet that highlights typical GNOME dev. attitude

Posted May 22, 2011 15:50 UTC (Sun) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]

It is true that the snippet that you chose from that email is fine. But the rest of his email is not--which is where the GP's mistaken impression of GNOME comes from.

I also appear to be under the mistaken impression that the QotW page is an aggregate of people whom contribute. At least that is what it seemed like it was to me, historically. My mistake.

Ryan Peters snippet that highlights typical GNOME dev. attitude

Posted May 22, 2011 15:35 UTC (Sun) by jake (editor, #205) [Link] (2 responses)

> Ryan Peters is not a GNOME developer, contributor or even a
> translator, as far as I can tell.

I guess I don't quite follow your point ... one has to be a GNOME developer (contributor, translator, ...) to have an opinion on GNOME 3? And the opinion in question didn't even seem to be particularly critical, so how is it flamebait?

jake

Ryan Peters snippet that highlights typical GNOME dev. attitude

Posted May 22, 2011 15:54 UTC (Sun) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link] (1 responses)

> I guess I don't quite follow your point ... one has to be a GNOME developer (contributor, translator, ...) to have an opinion on GNOME 3?

All opinions are not equal.

> And the opinion in question didn't even seem to be particularly critical, so how is it flamebait?

The quote wasn't but the email and the rest of Ryan's flamewar was. See my response to corbet above.

Ryan Peters snippet that highlights typical GNOME dev. attitude

Posted Jun 2, 2011 22:51 UTC (Thu) by Zizzle (guest, #67739) [Link]

> All opinions are not equal.

Translation: if you are not part of the inner GNOME cabal your opinion is invalid and will be ignored. Anyone who says anything bad about GNOME3 is clearly wrong - it is perfect! UI designers say so! What do stupid users know anyway?

Quotes of the week

Posted May 23, 2011 14:41 UTC (Mon) by i3839 (guest, #31386) [Link] (9 responses)

It seems Matthew Garret doesn't understand that those problems are problems that people who want something more lightweight don't have: Instead, their main problem is the bloatedness of the current solution.

Of course this only works if focus is kept, if the lightweight thing feature creeps towards the bloatware version, then it's indeed plain stupid.

As for this particular issue, I never understood the need for a display manager when not logging in remotely.

Quotes of the week

Posted May 23, 2011 15:12 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (8 responses)

Ubuntu don't want accessibility?

Quotes of the week

Posted May 23, 2011 16:30 UTC (Mon) by i3839 (guest, #31386) [Link] (7 responses)

No idea what Ubuntu got to do with all of this, but to me it seems it's not the display manager's job to solve accessibility: It should be either handled at the input level or at the toolkit level.

If the DM is not WM/IDE independent then it's not a good DM. And I'd go as far as saying that any DM not agnostic to what it's starting up should be made part of that other thing instead of pretending to be something separate.

But as I said, I don't get the point of DMs at all, to be honest, so take my words with a grain of salt. To me they seem to made 100% out of bloatware.

Quotes of the week

Posted May 23, 2011 16:35 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (6 responses)

I was criticising the decision for Ubuntu to change their default display manager from GDM to LightDM on the grounds that it's more lightweight. It's more lightweight because right now it doesn't do anywhere near as much as GDM does, and the majority of those functional differences are things (like accessibility integration) that Ubuntu wants.

Quotes of the week

Posted May 23, 2011 17:15 UTC (Mon) by i3839 (guest, #31386) [Link] (5 responses)

You did it by discrediting "lightweight" alternatives in general, which I disagreed with. Even though it is too often true that people starting leightweight versions of something don't fully understand the problem, usually they actually do understand the case better than the original bloatware authors. And case a) happens more often than you think, because writing software is all about managing complexity and many people are bad at that.

As for this particular LightDM situation, I'd argue that depending on the DM doing anything at all other than logging in and starting something else is bad design.

If Gnome wants a session, it should start one itself. It's not up to something not Gnome to do it for Gnome.

> one of the reasons gdm starts a local gnome session is that it wants
> gnome-power-manager to be there to handle power policy.

This is a really good example of really bad design. Basically it means that gdb is not really a DM, but part of Gnome. Fine, you're running Gnome, but don't pretend you're not. So starting Gdm only makes sense if you want to run Gnome. It doesn't make any sense when starting something else. So it's not a display manager, it turned into a Gnome manager.

Why this madness?

> Closing the lid of my laptop should suspend the system regardless of
> whether it's logged in or not.

Ah, is this it? But closing the lid of my laptop should suspend the system regardless of whether it's running a DM or not either, so you're just moving the problem. If you want to run gnome-power-manager you should start it at system boot. Starting it with gdm is just pushing it onto people who didn't ask for it, just like starting dbus and gconfd automatically is just annoying and bad behaviour.

> And now how about accessibility preferences?

It is not the DM's task to handle any preferences! What if the DM is used to start an IDE/WM it doesn't know about? Again, this should be handled at a lower level, not in the DM. The DM might not be started at all. If there is an agreed on standard way of setting them, the DM can of course provide an interface to set them, but it is feature creep.

What happened to the good old UNIX philosophy of running independent programs who have one clear purpose? It seems it died in the kitchen sink approach of "solving" all problems.

But you're right that choosing something because it's more lightweight is a bad reason on its own, the main incentive should be that the other one is crap.

Ubuntu is so not lightweight on its own, that them bothering about the DM is kinda funny.

Quotes of the week

Posted May 23, 2011 17:28 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (4 responses)

"I'd argue that depending on the DM doing anything at all other than logging in and starting something else is bad design."

Yet people expect their computers to do more than that. They expect to be able to adjust the brightness at the login screen. They expect the machine to go to sleep if the lid is closed at the login screen. They expect to be able to use a screen reader. They expect their colour profile to be correct. They don't expect there to be a set of gratuitous differences between the running OS and the login environment.

You can argue that all of these things should be handled at a lower level, but that lower level doesn't exist. The abstraction of mechanism and policy at pretty much every layer of the OS means that the only stage where you have an overview of the current system state is in a graphical session.

The only real case where a lightweight solution is preferable to a heavyweight one is when the heavyweight one provides functionality that's completely unnecessary in the relevant use case. That's not the situation here. GDM provides a significant range of functionality that's relevant and appropriate to the task of getting users logged into Gnome. LightDM doesn't, and nor does it provide any approach for solving these problems elsewhere.

Quotes of the week

Posted May 24, 2011 16:08 UTC (Tue) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (2 responses)

>The only real case where a lightweight solution is preferable to a heavyweight one is when the heavyweight one provides functionality that's completely unnecessary in the relevant use case.

All of the features you have described are of exactly zero value to me, so you appear to be making a strong case for the use of LightDM. At the same time, you seem to be arguing that there's no reason for LightDM to exist - that doesn't make a great deal of sense.

Quotes of the week

Posted May 24, 2011 16:33 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

I've never argued that LightDM shouldn't exist. I've argued that it being lightweight isn't a reason for Ubuntu to adopt it instead of gdm, since Ubuntu has users who do value those features.

Quotes of the week

Posted May 24, 2011 16:52 UTC (Tue) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

>I've never argued that LightDM shouldn't exist. I've argued that it being lightweight isn't a reason for Ubuntu to adopt it instead of gdm, since Ubuntu has users who do value those features.

Okay, that wasn't very clear since only the opening paragraph of your post mentions Ubuntu and the rest of it reads like a list of why you think LightDM is bad, per se.

Quotes of the week

Posted May 24, 2011 19:59 UTC (Tue) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]

A lot of the code which is in Gnome now probably ought to be moved outside of Gnome. For example, I use Xfce. As a result, I can't use NetworkManager. (Yes, there are a hacks to make this possible, but not good ones.) But what does networking have to do with drawing pretty windows on the screen? Nothing.

It's not really about being heavyweight or lightweight, but just about structuring the code properly. It's also about structuring the social responsibilities properly. The same people who are good at designing user interfaces may not be so good at figuring out color profiles or managing ACPI events. Why should these things be combined?