[284] in Athena User Interface
Re: GNOME 2.0: The incredible slipping release date.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)
Fri Jul 14 10:50:49 2000
To: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Cc: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@eazel.com>, aui@MIT.EDU,
Richard Tibbetts <tibbetts@MIT.EDU>
From: tb@MIT.EDU (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)
Date: 14 Jul 2000 10:50:44 -0400
In-Reply-To: Bill Cattey's message of "Fri, 14 Jul 2000 01:38:27 -0400 (EDT)"
Message-ID: <u1hg0pcu5ob.fsf@pusey.mit.edu>
Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU> writes:
> Three basic show stoppers come to mind:
These are bad things. But they are not show stoppers.
A show stopper is something which would make the resulting AUI system
*worse* than what we have now on Athena. None of these have this
problem, they all make the system worse than we wish it would be, but
not worse than Athena is now.
> 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.
If we have no file browser at all, we are certainly no worse off than
we are today. Athena's has an amazingly piss-poor file browser, and
punting one in AUI entirely will not make AUI not worth doing.
> 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.
sawfish is already better than mwm. Would you like me to make mwm
mis-behave?
> 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.
Athena's current help system doesn't exist.
> I would have to make a VERY strong case for why MIT's
> money is being wasted on GNOME.
One reason, strangely discounted, is that this may be the only way to
successfully continue to hire developers.
