Re: GNOME

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

On Mon, 20 Oct 1997, Bruce Perens wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 20, 1997 at 06:16:00PM -0700, Bruce Perens wrote:
> > Are we packaging GNOME and the various components needed to run it?
> 
> From: Riku Voipio <riku.voipio@iki.fi>
> > I think that someone said he'd do it, but I'm not sure...
> 
> Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au> brought it up on debian-user, but is _not_
> packaging it as far as I can tell.

that's right. i "advertised" it when i first discovered it in the hope
that someone would pick it up and package it. i don't have the time to
package and support it myself.

IMO, the gimp's GTK is *the* way to go for a "debian preferred" GUI
toolkit.  Free, Functional and Fast.  Unix/Linux has needed a good,
free, well documented, bazaar development style GUI toolkit for
years...with GTK we've finally got one and i think that Debian (and
SPI) should support it as much as possible.  GTK will, I think, be the
GUI library which eventually kills Motif from at least the free software
world.


> [about designating them our preferred desktop]
> > 100% Agree (but let's wait it mature). We could send them a support message
> > to puch the spirit and give their project clear future.
> 
> I was very impressed with what I saw in Aachen. The problem is that too many
> people are writing for Qt now - more on that in a later message.

agree here.  I think that KDE sounds nice, and it's goals are admirable but
it suffers from one fundamental flaw: it is based on non-free software.  

(OTOH the last time i actually ran any kde stuff i didn't like it at
all. buggy, unstable and overly simple. i think i commented here in
debian-devel that it was doing a very good job of making linux run just
as badly as windows. however that was for a version a long time ago...i
am sure that it has improved a lot since then.  I'll take another look
at kde when my local mirror catches up with Andreas' latest released
packages).


debian should have both gnome and kde packages. kde would have to go
in contrib, of course. with any luck people will take some of the
source code or ideas in kde and start porting them to gnome/gtk so that
important/useful things in kde will eventually migrate to the completely
free environment of gtk.


> I think what I would like to do is get the Debian packages out, and
> put out a message of support for the GNOME project on debian-announce,
> and then do whatever we can to assist the project.

cool.

craig


PS: yes, i see kde as being very much a "second class citizen" for debian.
this is inevitable given the licensing policy of Qt.


--
craig sanders
networking consultant                  Available for casual or contract
temporary autonomous zone              system administration tasks.


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