Date: Tue, 9 Mar 2004 11:40:00 -0800 From: Johnson David <DavidJohnson@Siemens.com> To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Cc: "Drews, Jonathan*" <DrewsJ@cder.fda.gov> Subject: Re: Are the Open Source desktops too complicated? Message-ID: <200403091140.00608.DavidJohnson@Siemens.com> In-Reply-To: <4C88DC099E9AF945A6DA4D6FFA1865D17D728F@cdsx06.cder.fda.gov> References: <4C88DC099E9AF945A6DA4D6FFA1865D17D728F@cdsx06.cder.fda.gov>
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On Tuesday 09 March 2004 11:21 am, Drews, Jonathan* wrote: > I tend to agree with Victoria Livschitz, a senior IT architect with > Sun Microsystems. Perhaps the Kde (and Gnome) desktops are becoming > to complicated for volunteers to adequately maintain? I would seriously discount Sun's musings. It seems like they're rehashing old ground that Fred Brooks has thoroughly explored. If they're having a problem with Sun's version of Gnome, they should look at themselves instead of Gnome. I would definitely not take Victoria's comment of "buggy to a point beyond salvation" out of context. She was not talking about Gnome or KDE. She was talking about software projects in general. And to a Java community in particular. Large programs do have more bugs. No one with any experience in the field disagrees with this. So what KDE and Gnome have done is to split up the desktop into small autonomous components. A bug in Kwrite does not affect Kwin, for example. Also, a less-than-conscientious developer for one component doesn't damage the quality of the remaining components. I agree with you though on documentation. I did some docs for Krayon. But this is nothing new. Developers of all stripes, proprietary or free, hate to do documentation. For them documentation is something you do after the code is finished, while for "process" people documentation is something you do before anything else. But somehow KDE and Gnome seem to produce quality documentation. Maybe not to the high standards of FreeBSD documentation, but then again, very few projects regardless of size are able to do that. David
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