glib in kdesupport: yes or no?

[Havoc Pennington]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 01:34:07AM -0500, Navindra Umanee wrote: 
> > so we were forced to take some action. A lot of people felt that
> > fragmentation was intractable and we must choose sides. Preston and I
> 
> You *did* choose sides.  GNOME is the Red Hat default, and that's
> *fine*.
> 

Well I hope it's fine - we kind of have to choose a default. ;-) 
And no other distribution or OS takes flak for doing so.

That's not what I mean by choosing sides though. Choosing sides would
be a much more proactive kind of thing; making one of the desktops "as
is"/"unsupported" or removing it entirely.

> However, the casual user who installs KDE (for whatever unlikely
> reason) will find themselves presented with an environment that
> suffers from both GNOME and KDE bloat and sports an interface that
> looks virtually identical to GNOME but buggier (given the lack of KDE
> manpower at Red Hat).  Where's the sense in that?

If we think OpenOffice, Mozilla, and Evolution are the best *current*
choices for apps, then users should be offered those by default. Other
people and distributions including some based on KDE have made the
same choices, so it's certainly a defensible argument. OpenOffice is
bloated, yes. However, the functionality it offers outweighs that.

We do spend significant time fixing KDE bugs and working on KDE in
general. There is no reason our KDE should be buggier than our GNOME;
I don't know of any evidence that it is. We have more "core" GNOME
developers, but then we also make more GNOME changes that can cause
bugs.

Are there some bugs in both? Sure. Are some of them our fault? Yes.
Do we try to avoid them, and fix them? Yes.

If we're going to ship/support KDE we're going to work on it and try
to make it follow our best judgment as to what customers will like,
just as we do for GNOME, Apache, gcc, or the kernel. We only ship
things "as is" if we don't care about them.

> People were already very pleased with the state of KDE in Red Hat 7.3
> but now it's likely that people who have already deployed KDE will
> look at KDE in Red Hat 8.0 and reject it.  I'm sure Bero et al could
> have kept KDE in acceptable shape while providing decent integration
> in GNOME.

However, 8.0 got much more positive feedback than 7.3 on the whole,
and lots of the positive comments are from people using KDE.

You guys are assuming that KDE comes off badly in 8.0, but the
information I've seen doesn't support that conclusion at all.

Havoc