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Re: GNOME on cygwin
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
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