Re: Desktop Architects

On Thu, 2007-02-22 at 18:43 -0500, Martin Cracauer wrote:
Michael R. Head wrote on Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 11:55:09PM -0500:
On Wed, 2007-02-21 at 12:34 -0600, Benjamin Gramlich wrote:
Is anyone here following the discussion of Gnome on the desktop
architects mailing list?

Yeah, I'm on both lists. Any particular comments?

I think there are very few people who actually discuss the real point.
Linus found a case in the GNOME code where:
- something that should be configurable wasn't
- two other things of the same kind were configurable, both in an
ad-hoc manner
- even there they lacked a decent frontend to actually do the
configuration possible
- he sent patches to clean up the mess, treat everything the same and
make it configurable

After a messy discussion he makes the point that certain groups of
developers in the OpenSource community are very quick shots to dismiss
complaints without even looking into them, then after en initial wrong
statement entrenching themselves in a bug-compatible manner throughout
a non-conversation. This appears to be more common with groups that
target a wider audience, and want an easy to get into system. I am
afraid I have observed that myself with both GNOME and Fedora,
repeatedly. It is a sharp contrast to e.g. FreeBSD, where the default
answer to complains is "You're right. So what? Send patches or shut
up.".

Patches are always welcome. Simply adding ‘features’ tends to not work
much, though, because feature are in most cases non-orthogonal and
interact with parts of the system the patch author had not even
considered. <http://ometer.com/features.html> and
<http://ometer.com/free-software-ui.html> spell out these issue quite
more clearly that I can.

If you browse bugzilla, you'll notice that patches tend to be slow to
come, though.

Personally I am at the edge of ditching GNOME because I can't figure
out how to put different background pictures on my different screens
(non-Xinerama, fvwm2). It's nothing life-threatening or even
productivity-damaging. But it shows that there's some seriously short
thinking here (different aspect ratios on both displays make a
same-picture policy a joke). It doesn't help that I cannot find the
code that actually does the picture display for the background.
Digging through starting from the gconf variable names didn't get me
far.

If you google for "gnome different background per-workspace" the first
result is <http://live.gnome.org/PowerUserTools> which includes a link
to an app called wallpapoz which does apparently what you want.

The request asking for this has been sitting on bugzilla for quite a
while (the bug is #48004) waiting for someone to come up with a sensible
design for the feature. Implementing it will probably be quite trivial,
-once- a sensible design is drafted.

It's mirroring my first GTK+ programming experience where I was
looking for the $DISPLAY holder that is passed around in contexts,
only to see there is none. It's a hardcoded global variable so that a
GTK+ application cannot (or at the time could not) open GTK windows on
more than one display at the same time.

FWIW, you have been able to use gtk_window_set_screen
<http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/GtkWindow.html#gtk-window-set-screen>
since gtk+ 2.2, which was released in december 2002.

Cheers,

-- m


--
Mariano Suárez-Alvarez
http://www.gnome.org/~mariano


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