[282] in Athena User Interface
Re: GNOME 2.0: The incredible slipping release date.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Fri Jul 14 01:38:34 2000
Message-ID: <8tPeRH0GgE6e1n_280@mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 01:38:27 -0400 (EDT)
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@eazel.com>
CC: aui@MIT.EDU, Richard Tibbetts <tibbetts@MIT.EDU>
In-Reply-To: <lqg0pd1r0d.fsf@pythagoras.eazel.com>
I'm sorry you perceived my note as a flame.
Others on the AUI list will tell you that I'm the guy who kept the AUI
project alive after all the initial people doing the work left. I am
the strongest advocate to people outside this group in favor of GNOME.
From where I stand, however there are a few very basic show stoppers.
I assume the session management bug that makes even the most basic
Athena login take minutes instead of second will be fixed ver soon, so
it's unfair to consider it a show stopper. But until it's fixed it IS a
show stopper.
Three basic show stoppers come to mind:
We want a file browser, but Nautilus will not be ready in time to show
off to the people who will be judging whether or not to put GNOME in
the pipe to deliver a year from now. The other file browsers are not
really so great from a usability or robustness standpoint.
We are going to be demoing GNOME-athena using sawfish, but it's going
to be in beta when we do. It will not portray GNOME in the most
favorable light if it mis-behaves when the people who hold the purse
strings are watching.
A help browser that doesn't look to the naive users like netscape would
be very good. But I hear that the new one is rather far away from
distribution.
I continue to advocate GNOME but I have EXTREMELY mixed fealings about
doing so.
The people I have to convince to bless adoption of GNOME in Athena
school-wide are NOT in the Free Software Community. They are willing to
use stuff from there if it can be shown to be as usable as other stuff.
A head to head comparison of the KDE file manager and gmc quite frankly,
frightens me. I would have to make a VERY strong case for why MIT's
money is being wasted on GNOME.
So instead of accusing me of flaming, give me amunition to support GNOME, eh?
-wdc
