[287] in Athena User Interface
Re: GNOME 2.0: The incredible slipping release date.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Maciej Stachowiak)
Fri Jul 14 14:49:45 2000
To: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Cc: aui@MIT.EDU, Richard Tibbetts <tibbetts@MIT.EDU>
From: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@eazel.com>
Date: 14 Jul 2000 11:50:07 -0700
In-Reply-To: Bill Cattey's message of "Fri, 14 Jul 2000 01:38:27 -0400 (EDT)"
Message-ID: <lqpuogy2ao.fsf@pythagoras.eazel.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU> writes:
> I'm sorry you perceived my note as a flame.
I don't think your remark about "fixing everything and shipping
nothing" was accurate, whether or not you meant it as a flame. We do
have reasonably planned release schedules. I'm sorry that they don't
result in software magically appearing at times that would be most
useful for AUI; "software is hard".
> 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.
I appreciate that, and I think the rest of the GNOME community does
too. I think people will be more receptive to your concerns if you
mention specific things you want fixed (as you did below) rather than
saying vague things about how GNOME slips release schedules, and
implying that this somehow makes KDE better.
> 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.
When do you want to show it off? I expect there to be a buggy but
mostly usable preview release by late August/early September. The
final release is unlikely to happen until mid October at the earliest,
but when we do release it, it will be solid.
Nontheless I think gmc is better than what Athena has now, and showing
that as the short-term solution and a Nautilus preview release as the
long-term solution should (I hope) make a nice case.
> 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.
As Thomas mentioned, it's already way more stable than Mwm (or most
any other window manager).
> 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.
Why is "looking like netscape" a flaw? (I'm not denying it is, I'm
just not sure why you think so).
> 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?
If that would involve adjusting the release schedule forwards, I can't
do that; we will release when ready and no sooner.
I'm willing to advocate the importance of fixing specific bugs you
mention, or better yet, advocate the integration of your patches to
fix these problems.
Let me know what else would be useful ammunition. You have the
attention of one of the two people in charge of the next GNOME
release, so make use of it. :-)
- Maciej
