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Re: galeon (not) in Debian stable



On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 04:50:37PM +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Sven Luther">
> 
> > But redhat is one of the big gnome developers, and gnome has included now
> > epiphany and not galeon, which is, as you well know, a political statement
> > and a choice in the lamentable galeon fork that happened last year.
> 
> Dude, neither choice was political in nature.

Each choice of one of the branches of a fork is political in nature,
even if you base it on technical decisions and such.

> Read the release team's module summary for a pretty good analysis of why
> both GNOME and Red Hat chose to make a commitment to - independently I might
> add - Epiphany as their default browser. Galeon was never dumped: GNOME has
> never shipped a browser, Red Hat has previously shipped Mozilla.

Any url to it ?

> Despite some disagreement with specific choices that the Epiphany team have
> made, it is the right choice. It has a stronger team, dedicated maintainers,

Well, i don't think so, And it is ironic, don't you fing, that the
epiphany people are now adding all the features the fork was about back
then, like mouse gestures and so on.

Also, it is because of the aims and choices that so many people where
very unhappy about galeon 1.3 featurelessness. And epiphany doesn't even
has the personal toolbar stuff, which is sort of going backward.

And on top of that, they hijacked the epiphany name from the boulderdash
clone which has been in debian for years, but then, so has the phoenix
project with the firebird name.

Not to forget that the lead epiphany developer is targeting, not your
average debian user, but his grandmother who is not computer literate.
This may be all well for gnome and its new corporate market target, but
it is wrong for debian to make such statement, and has already alienated
a big part of the galeon userbase.

Disclaimer : notice that the same can be said for most of gnome, but you
get used to it some, and there are other tools, but i bet that most
people which mades such critics about gnome2 where primarily concerned
about the galeon 1.3 state.

> continuing maintenance and QA work, stated usability goals, and commitment
> to the GNOME Desktop release schedule and goals. You described the fork as
> "lamentable", however, I would certainly not describe the results of the

It was lamentable, because there could have been a compromise made, and
it was not, and thus the teams did split, and galeon was refused as part
of gnome 2.2 and so on.

> fork as such. Not by a long shot. We now have a maintainable browser, and a
> strong developer team, with a LOT of momentum.

Normal, they hijacked the galeon developer base, no ?

> Right now, I still use Galeon. But it's becoming very clear that Epiphany is
> (faster|better|stabler|etc), and that at some stage, I should shift.

Because there is more development effort put in it, but the same could
have been said if there would not have been work. And frankly, could you
tell me the main feature difference between galeon and epiphany ? The
bookmark handling of epiphany, which could has well have been
implemented in a branch and then incorporated in galeon or something ?
The lousy preference editor of epiphany, which did go a big step
backward from what we had in galeon under the HIG dictatorship ? Even
evolution implements something similar.

> Please don't spread gunk like this as if it is the truth.

Go read the october archives of the galeon mailing list then.

Supporting epiphany over galeon, and the whole fork was an error, and
now we are paying for it. Removing galeon from debian/sarge would be an
error too, and i hope it does not happen.

Friendly,

Sven Luther



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