Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 15:53:10 -0700 (PDT) From: patl@phoenix.volant.org To: Ade Lovett <ade@lovett.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: GNOME: Does anyone use it? Message-ID: <ML-3.4.939077590.2767.patl@asimov> In-Reply-To: <19991004162614.H65863@lovett.com>
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On 4-Oct-99 at 14:26, Ade Lovett (ade@lovett.com) wrote: > On Mon, Oct 04, 1999 at 01:30:20PM -0700, patl@phoenix.volant.org wrote: > > > > [snip] > > > > I do this one port at a time instead of > > letting make handle the dependancies. (This is a big enough PITA > > that I don't upgrade that often. My last update was 9 July. I'll > > be trying the current versions in a few days when I upgrade the OS > > to 3.3.) > > I'd suggest that you hold off doing an update for a short while. > > The GNOME folks are almost ready to release a 1.0.50 version (initially > scheduled for end of September), and a number of us are working on the > necessary port updates (by my reckoning there are no less than 23 ports > that have to be updated). I saw some notes about that in the -ports list. I've been kind of hoping that the ports updates would be committed before I'm ready to do the 3.3 install. I just sort of forgot about that detail until after I'd sent my previous message. > This particular GNOME update is going to be even more messy (if that > were possible :) than the last few, since glib/gtk+ have to be updated > to 1.2.5 for gnome-core (and ports that depend on it) to work. > > Which means an awful lot of package deleting and recompiling/adding. The last time I did a GNOME update, I had to delete it down to that level. It is a -huge- pain, primarily because it basicly drags me down to the ASCII console level during the delete and rebuild. Life would be so much easier if FreeBSD could properly handle updating installed packages. (The biggest problem is that you can't safely delete the old package because it won't recognize which files shouldn't be deleted because they are still in use by the new version.) > Regarding stability, I've found FreeBSD GNOME to be about the same > as running under Linux (RedHat 5.2) -- during the bigger updates, I > tend to run two systems side by side (admittedly as virtual hosts > under VMWare/NT). VMWare sounds interesting; but even that isn't enough to get me to run NT. What I'd really like to see would be an Open Source system that is conceptually closer to the old IBM VM/370 design. It could use drivers and much of the kernel from *BSD, Linux, or whatever. But instead of running on top of another OS, it should be the kernel; and it should -not- support running programs directly, only virtual machines. Add a mechanism to allow VM-aware OSes to communicate with the VM and delegate certain operations (e.g. paging) to it, and you've got an ideal system for multi-os or multiple virtual host operations. But I digress... > Of course, as with everything, if people don't know about the problems, > then it becomes that much more difficult to fix them, either with > GNOME itself, or the FreeBSD ports thereof. I confess to not submitting bug reports for the few problems that I've had. My only defense is that I haven't had the cycles to track them down to the point where I would have sufficient details to be useful. > Things are compounded for non-Linux people by GNOME's horribly > (in some places) Linux-centric nature (take a peek at the size of > some of the patches in /usr/ports to see what I mean). Yes, I know. I find it particularly irritating since traditionally portability has been a high-order bit for GNU projects. But in the last few years there seems to be a growing body of engineers that equate GNU with Linux; because Linux is so dependant on GNU tools. They just haven't recognized that 'A implies B' does not mean that 'B implies A'. How open are they to rolling portability patches back into the master source? > We try extremely hard not to introduce any further problems in the > porting process, but GNOME is absolutely huge, and RealJobs[tm] tend > to get in the way. Tell me about it. Keeping income flowing and still maintaining something resembling a Life has been keeping me from contributing the way I'd like to. -Pat To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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