Red hat 8.0

[Paul Iadonisi]

On Wed, 2002-12-25 at 09:59, John Abreau wrote:

[snip]

> It's like Redhat was saying 
> 
>     "If you don't *LIKE* metacity, you don't have to *USE* gnome."
> 
> Kind of reminds me of the Windows Refund crap where manufacturers would 
> tell customers: "If you don't want Windows on your laptop, you don't have 
> to buy a laptop at all".
> 
> The GUI for switching window managers was replaced with one that only lets 
> you choose between gnome, kde, windowmaker, and twm. Yet another roadblock 
> to try to keep metacity in place. 

  I must say, even being the Red Hat advocate that I am, I've seen
nothing in this thread that I can't agree with
  However, just to clear up a point, Red Hat switched from Gnome 1.4 to
Gnome 2.0 in Red Hat 8.0 and, to the best of my knowledge, there *is no*
gui for switching window managers in Gnome 2.0.  The good news is that I
read one of the Gnome summaries not long ago and there is apparently a
new window manager switcher gui in the works for Gnome 2.2.
  In a little defense of Havoc Pennington (metacity's author), he has
some points about most window managers trying to implement feature A but
all of them implementing feature A wrong.  I imagine there's a lot of
crufty code in many window managers and he's trying to keep the metacity
code base manageable.
  But I have to agree that metacity goes way too far and, quite frankly
I find it completely and horrendously crippling for me.  It has
absolutely zero of the features that I absolutely need.  To make matters
worse, sawfish has gone into maintenance-only mode.  Red Hat will, at
least, push bugs upstream as they do with many packages that they ship,
but don't directly support.
  This all goes back to some previous threads (that I started) about my
frustrations with the direction of Gnome and even some other
developers.  Most want to make their own life easier at the expense of
features.  Yes, there is a lot of creeping featuritis out there, but I'm
talking about features that are definitely necessary and widely used. 
Witness evolution's lack of inline pgp support and the developers
statements that they will never implement it.  (I've heard the
statements that they will accept patches, but there are complications
with that.  One post I read mentioned that Ximian has to be careful
about accepting code from anyone outside of Ximian since it is GPLed
code that is linked to the proprietary Ximian Connector for Exchange. 
You probably have to sign over your copyright to Ximian in order to
submit patches.)
  Another problem, and again, this is more a Gnome 2.0 thing than a Red
Hat thing, is the dearth of themes available for GTK+2.  The relevant
sections at themes.freshmeat.net have over 400 for GTK+ 1.0, but (when I
last checked) only about 17 for GTK+ 2.0.  But, that's understandable
given that GTK+ 2.0 is relatively new.
  So yes, there are some annoyances with Red Hat 8.0 / Gnome 2.0, but
some of it is just growing pains.  I doubt the next release will fix
much of that since, if you've checked the latest beta from them
(Phoebe), there is still no change in metacity or in the difficulty of
switching from it to sawfish.  I think we'll just have to wait until
Gnome 2.2 comes out to see some of the improvements some of us are
looking for.  (Note: there is a version weirdness to note about sawfish
in Phoebe -- the version is 1.2 where the version in 8.0 was 2.0.  It's
a version weirdness.  Don't know where 2.0 actually came from, but 1.2
is, I believe,more recent than 2.0.)
  Anyhow, on a lighter note, happy holidays to all!
-- 
-Paul Iadonisi
 Senior System Administrator
 Red Hat Certified Engineer / Local Linux Lobbyist
 Ever see a penguin fly?  --  Try Linux.
 GPL all the way: Sell services, don't lease secrets