There were some useful comments on my previous post, but I think they missed my point: there’s too much complexity here. It’s true that entirely self-contained applications are a relic of yesteryear and that having things work well together is useful, but it’s the mechanics that drive me nuts…some questions I have to ask every time I interact with desktop apps and related infrastructure these days:
- Is it gconf, dconf, gsettings, kconfig, or some random other thing today? Is it worth figuring out before it’s something else?
- Has it recently been entirely re-written to be the one true solution, obsoleting everything that went ten minutes before? And will it be re-invented ten minutes from now?
- Is there a web page I can go to to get a non core GNOME/whatever developer summary of what’s going on? (no, there isn’t).
- etc.
Heck, last time I tried building GNOME I followed the jhbuild instructions, only to be told that I was doing it wrong and should use something else now GNOME Shell is the flavor of the month. I have nothing against forward progress, but I have a lot against random new things popping up that suddenly replace stuff and aren’t well understood outside of a small group of core developers. The Linux kernel developers take great steps to ensure this is not the case and I would love to see the same happen elsewhere.
Hope that clarifies my frustrations. It’s not so much that gnome-settings-daemon can’t handle NFS mounts properly, it’s that it might not even be worth looking into it because I fear it’ll be replaced by something entirely new, “super awesome” (but not well understood or widely documented) solution in about ten minutes from now.
Jon.
Damn kids! Git off ma lawn!
You rant about changes every ten minutes? Let me compare it with the kernel (which I suppose you would claim to be much better in this department than Gnome). So, gconf’s first commit is http://git.gnome.org/browse/gconf/commit/?id=7c6fe0a88f4024261bdde8a6d2f888fbc3ac6b92 … that’s from July 1999. Hmm, what was the kernel in July 1999?
You’re right.
You’ve just articulated CADT ( http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html ). I have friend who have been driven to Macs because of this – the burn out catches up with you in the end.
My own thinking is that this is just a symptom of open source – without the massive resources to maintain the old way of doing things with shims, the only way progress can be made is with these endless rewrites.
Yes, CADT is exactly right.