On Wed, 2010-08-04 at 21:37 -0400, John J. McDonough wrote: > Something that should be mentioned. GNOME is a huge, lumbering system > with ten or twelve zillion libraries. Lots of programs rely on those > libraries, but no program relies on all of them. As you port a program > you may also need to port libraries that it requires, and a LOT of the > time, those libraries are going to be part of GNOME.
Actually, GNOME has gone on a diet over the last few years, obsoleting entire libraries and moving similar but improved functionality into a smaller set of libraries. Also remember that every single library is packaged separately, unlike KDE (where kdelibs cannot practically be split up). Still, the distro is around ten to fifteen libraries short of providing the dependencies for the vast majority of GNOME programs. Since there are already in Ports, why aren't these in the distro? I already maintain a proportionally large number of the distro packages, and there is legitimate concern that having too many packages maintained by one volunteer would lead to a difficult situation for the rest of the distro if said volunteer were to leave the project for whatever reason (a seemingly inevitable situation in community-run FOSS projects). OTOH, I do feel that Cygwin would be a much better product with the GNOME and KDE libraries and applications commonly found in Linux distros, and I've lost count of how many people struggle to build things which are already available for, but not shipped with, Cygwin. Personally, I think it would benefit RH to actually hire people to focus on Cygwin as a distribution (Corinna's focus is on newlib/winsup). But then again, that's probably just wishful thinking on my part (currently looking for work). > KDE is similar, although perhaps not quite as massive as GNOME. Having built and used both, I would disagree, but I don't want this to become a GNOME v. KDE flame war. > Many of the other desktops were developed specifically to avoid the huge > overhead of GNOME and KDE. But of course, as soon as you install a > program built on one of those foundations, you need to pull in the > associated libraries, and take the associated performance hit. That depends on what you mean by "GNOME" and "KDE": the desktop, or the applications? While these and other desktops can be built for Cygwin -- and I have done so in the past, mostly as proof-of-concept (and the obligatory screenshots) -- they tend to be awfully slow (due to IPC?) and IMHO rather unnecessary on Cygwin. For instance, I run XWin in multiwindow mode, a partial-length fbpanel on screen top, and the dozen-or-so (mostly GTK/GNOME) apps which I use on a daily basis. If, like me, your focus is running applications, then you need the GTK/GNOME and Qt/KDE libraries; with the exception of Xfce, the other desktops don't provide anything additional for programs. > GNOME is also undergoing a huge change. It probably wouldn't make a lot > of sense to put a great deal of effort into a GNOME port at this point > in time when the whole GNOME world will change in a few months. GNOME 3.0 isn't architecturally as big of a change as the version would indicate. Because GLib/GTK+ development is "in-house", they have very wisely made the transition gradual and smooth, whereas KDE had no choice but to break things in 4.0 because Trolltech had done so between Qt 3 and 4. Furthermore, GNOME 3.0 just got pushed off until next spring, so this fall's release will be a more ordinary 2.32, with only a preview of GTK 3.0 and friends. That leaves enough time to justify continuing with the non-deprecated parts of 2.x, should we so choose. Yaakov -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://x.cygwin.com/docs/ FAQ: http://x.cygwin.com/docs/faq/