On Sun, May 21, 2006 at 09:59:30AM +0200, Sven Burmeister wrote:

Hi!

Am Sonntag, 21. Mai 2006 01:46 schrieb Keith Kastorff:

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On Sun, 2006-05-21 at 01:28 +0200, Pascal Bleser wrote:

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I would really like to have an explanation: why is it that other distributions (e.g. Fedora and Ubuntu) already have packages for (at least) GNOME 2.14 but none are provided for SUSE Linux ? GNOME supplementary still ships 2.12.

And now, the "general problem": I just don't see ex-Ximian people involved into openSUSE at all.

I thought zenworks, which is part of 10.1 would be what those ex-Ximian people work on. And the fact that KDE is not default anymore, does show that Gnome-folks are heavily involved in the decision-process, does it not?

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I don't have the answers, but I certainly support the questions. Thanks, Pascal, for having the guts to ask.

Maybe the Gnome/Mono-devs had to and still have to spend all their time on "integrating" zen, because it got released in beta-state?

Zen Linux Management is yet another team. :) Ciao, Marcus

søndag 21 maj 2006 12:33 skrev Janne Karhunen:

Is the same team responsible for the greatest regression in 10.1 that adding new installation sources fails most of the time :/ ? Do you already have a BZ entry of this?

I think this is a bit off topic, but.. If you had tried the packagemanagement (rug/zen/yast) a month ago you would be amazed that it almost works now. My handling of this issue is (1) report bugs/give feedback and thus help get it right for 10.2, (2) primarily use Smart for package management and (3) warn noobs that 10.1 is sort of an interim release - as far as packagemanagement goes - to avoid that this release does serious damage to the good and respected (by sane, mature people at least) SUSE name. On topic (bit of a flamebait, sorry can't resist): As I understand it the supplementary repos often contain packages that the packagers do on their own time. Guess that would imply that the GNOME guys don't care as much about the users as the KDE people do. I certainly can say that I'm extremely happy about the people keeping KDE supplementary very up to date. Great work! Martin / cb400f

Op zo, 21-05-2006 te 13:13 +0200, schreef Martin Schlander:

If you had tried the packagemanagement (rug/zen/yast) a month ago you would be amazed that it almost works now. My handling of this issue is (1) report bugs/give feedback and thus help get it right for 10.2

Surely we can expect packagemanagement to get stable with some updates so we don't have to wait 8 months for 10.2?

(3) warn noobs that 10.1 is sort of an interim release - as far as packagemanagement goes - to avoid that this release does serious damage to the good and respected (by sane, mature people at least) SUSE name.

!?!? You are joking right? If it is so bad, it shouldn't be sold at al, or at least put a big warning on the box saying; don't use this unless you like trouble. Chris Maaskant.

Op zo, 21-05-2006 te 19:14 +0200, schreef Marcus Meissner:

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Surely we can expect packagemanagement to get stable with some updates so we don't have to wait 8 months for 10.2?

Yes, you can.

Good, you had me worried.. Thanks :-) Chris Maaskant.

On Tue, May 23, 2006 at 12:04:36AM +0200, Martin Schlander wrote:

I'm just speaking my mind as a community member - I never had anything to do with the decision to release. In my opinion 10.1 packagemanagement is bad enough to give SUSE a bad rep - who knows how long it'll take to remedy that.

I have heard people who loved it and call it a reason to upgrade from 10.0 to 10.1. I have not thoughroughly tested it, so I have no opinion. Also I might be biassed, because I have been using YaST for so long now that anything else (including smart, apt and yum) just don't cut it. -- houghi http://houghi.org http://www.plainfaqs.org/linux/ http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html

Today I went outside. My pupils have never been tinier...

Marcus Meissner wrote:

On Sun, May 21, 2006 at 01:33:15PM +0300, Janne Karhunen wrote:

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On Sunday 21 May 2006 12:05, Marcus Meissner wrote:

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Maybe the Gnome/Mono-devs had to and still have to spend all their time on "integrating" zen, because it got released in beta-state? Zen Linux Management is yet another team. :) Is the same team responsible for the greatest regression in 10.1 that adding new installation sources fails most of the time :/ ? Do you already have a BZ entry of this?

The new package management is a joint effort between SUSE YaST and ZLM development ;)

And as many other join efforts is filled with decisions that have more social than technical background :-) -- Regards, Rajko.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 James Ogley wrote:

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And now, the "general problem": I just don't see ex-Ximian people involved into openSUSE at all.

I see quite a few of them involved in some way or other, but when the

By "involved", I meant being on this mailing-list and/or on opensuse-packaging. Besides a few of them being aggregated on http://planetsuse.org, I don't think I've seen them directly involved in any way. It would be a pleasure to be corrected if I'm wrong ;)

decision was taken by SUSE that it was going to be 2.12 in 10.1, what were they supposed to do? Try to slip 2.14 into the build system and hope no-one noticed?

No, of course not, it's perfectly fine to have GNOME 2.12 ship with the 10.1 release as feature freeze already happened before 2.14 was out. It's a bit unfortunate from the timing, and same happened to KDE (shipping 3.5.1 although 3.5.2 was released shortly after the feature freeze), but that's OK. I mean, no chance of managing a release if you don't make a feature freeze at some point. That's not what I'm talking about, the release is fine. The issue is that GNOME 2.14 is not available in GNOME supplementary, neither for 10.1 nor for 10.0. KDE 3.5.2 has been released roughly at around the same time (more or less) and has been available in KDE supplementary for quite some time (at least for 10.0 - builds for 10.1 have been provided a week after 10.1 release). Actually, KDE 3.5.2 was released March 28, and GNOME 2.14 was on March 15. What I can't understand is that with acquiring Ximian, you'd expect Novell to be _the_ GNOME driver (as Ximian was). Sure, I guess a good part of the Ximian developers who were working on GNOME are now busy with other tasks (e.g. NetworkManager and Zen), but still. It just doesn't make any sense to me that the company that has some if not most of the lead developers of GNOME (as well as the GNOME project lead) on its payroll does not have up-to-date GNOME packages for its very own Linux distribution. So either my assumptions are wrong and the former Ximian staff is not involved in GNOME development any more, or providing an up-to-date GNOME is extremely low priority at Novell and those folks are using Ubuntu or Fedora Core on their workstations.

Now that 10.1 is out, I suspect we can expect to see 2.14 or 2.15 appear in supplementary (can I just say, I'd prefer to see 2.14, at least at first - good to have something mostly stable in there, but 2.15 in Factory would be good, we can aim to have 2.16 in 10.2).

GNOME 2.14 has been released March 15, 2 months ago. How can we explain to SUSE users that Ubuntu or Fedora Core comes with GNOME 2.14, but SUSE Linux doesn't provide it as an upgrade path, although it does for KDE 3.5.2 ? It's been asked quite frequently, which is understandable, as it doesn't make sense to me either. And frankly, I really don't know what to answer, which is why I've posted that mail. If there's some good reason to it, fine, but to say the least, it would be nice to know why. Don't forget we're the ones who are on the first line with the community and the SUSE Linux users. cheers - -- -o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/ /\\ _\_v The more things change, the more they stay insane. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFEcCosr3NMWliFcXcRAjcxAKCCUqOus1P8vbqQfgXPSzsAG2vA2gCdES2O qktpEzxm4Mb4sP1WERzu6m8= =sIqW -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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And now, the "general problem": I just don't see ex-Ximian people involved into openSUSE at all. I see quite a few of them involved in some way or other, but when the By "involved", I meant being on this mailing-list and/or on opensuse-packaging. Besides a few of them being aggregated on http://planetsuse.org, I don't think I've seen them directly involved in any way.

They are *developers*, that should be developing and not bothered with all this noise. Developing really good stuff, which they do, is hard work and requires concentrated effort.

The issue is that GNOME 2.14 is not available in GNOME supplementary, neither for 10.1 nor for 10.0. KDE 3.5.2 has been released roughly at around the same time (more or less) and has been available in KDE supplementary for quite some time (at least for 10.0 - builds for 10.1 have been provided a week after 10.1 release). Actually, KDE 3.5.2 was released March 28, and GNOME 2.14 was on March 15.

Well, I'm a long time GNOME user. I use GNOME 10+ hours a day... and I just don't care that much about 2.12 vs. 2.14 vs. whatever. It will show up on my desktop/laptop at some point, but the current GNOME easily has the features required to get my work done. Maybe GNOME people are just lest prone to version mania.

What I can't understand is that with acquiring Ximian, you'd expect Novell to be _the_ GNOME driver (as Ximian was). Sure, I guess a good part of the Ximian developers who were working on GNOME are now busy with other tasks (e.g. NetworkManager and Zen), but still. It just doesn't make any sense to me that the company that has some if not most of the lead developers of GNOME (as well as the GNOME project lead) on its payroll does not have up-to-date GNOME packages for its very own Linux distribution.

Maybe the focus of the *distribution* is just to provide a solid and will integrated desktop environment, which the provided version of GNOME provides?

So either my assumptions are wrong and the former Ximian staff is not involved in GNOME development any more, or providing an up-to-date GNOME is extremely low priority at Novell and those folks are using Ubuntu or Fedora Core on their workstations.

Who cares what they use.

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Now that 10.1 is out, I suspect we can expect to see 2.14 or 2.15 appear in supplementary (can I just say, I'd prefer to see 2.14, at least at first - good to have something mostly stable in there, but 2.15 in Factory would be good, we can aim to have 2.16 in 10.2). GNOME 2.14 has been released March 15, 2 months ago.

Just two months ago? In a corporate environment it is freakin' *RARE* to see ANY package updated/installed withing 2 months of its release.

houghi wrote:

[...] A developer works for the community and should be aware what that community is talking about.

The GNOME developers mentioned in this thread are employed by Novell which means they work for Novell and not for the community. I think, Novell decides about the projects for those developers and what they are allowed to do and develop. If Novell is a good employer, then those developers can make proposals for reasonable projects, or they even have the right to make decisions on their own within their assigned area of responsibility. Of course, they should receive some feedback from the users and the community (a programmer/developer always needs some feedback!), but Novell (the employer) is still the top priority. And the developers have to account for their work. Cheers, Th.

houghi wrote:

[...]

They are employees, not slaves. So if they follow the community that they make the software for is just a logical step. Wether or not they are allowed to do what that community wants is another matter.

But then again they might be more interested in following a specific GNOME list.

From my point of view, it's a bit naive to think that Novell does all of

Well, nobody was talking about slaves. However, the developers are employed by Novell, a commercial company which wants to make some money. that (openSUSE project, build service, etc.) just because Novell wants to act as a benefactor. No, all of that is part of a strategy, and at the end of the day the hope is that it strengthens Novell's Linux sector and allows them to make more profit. Linux has become big business, it's no longer an OS developed by some freaks from universities and used by only a couple of hackers and freaks all over the world (well, maybe still a sort of freaks ;-)). Or do you think Novell bought SUSE just for fun? Although we have now openSUSE, we should not forget about all of that. The developers employed by Novell serve primarily the company, and the community comes second. I would be surprised if it works in a different way at Novell (I am working in an R&D department of a commercial company, so I know a bit about all of that). Novell has created an 'interface' to the community and this is the core team at SUSE - people who participate on this and other lists, answer our questions etc., and try to establish relationships to the community. I think that's the way to go (well, maybe Novell should expand the 'interface' a bit - it seems as if too much work needs to be done by only a few core people). However, not every developer should be part of this process - that's not necessary as the core team and, I guess, the support team provide sufficient internal feedback for the developers (at least I hope so ;-)). It would just be too time-consuming for them to try keeping an eye on all community issues (I think, Adam Tauno Williams was absolutely right in this point), that's in principle the focus of the 'interface' (core team). At the end of the day, all the major strategic decisions will be made by the management anyway. So the real question is whether the management (the decision maker) knows about the notions of the community. Greetings from London, Th.

houghi wrote:

[...] The way you read it, it as if the developers are not welcome here and should just listen to what Novell tells them. That is how I read your posting and I hope I read it wrong.

Yes, you're wrong. Everybody is welcome, I think all of us highly appreciate quality postings from developers. However, I think you are not aware of how it works in a commercial company that makes business based on software products - your statements lack from my point of view some realism. I am pretty sure that not all of Novell's employees share the opinion of the management. Nevertheless, they have to follow the company policy - or they have to quit (well, we have already seen some SUSE guys leaving Novell, and there were quite a lot of rumours why this has happened - I don't want to enter into that subject as I have no idea about the real reasons). We have seen in another posting that "The Ximian group has not existed for a long time, it was split into various groups after the Novell acquisition, and they have merged, transformed and shifted into various areas" (citing Miguel de Icaza). As you can see here, Novell split up the group - this seems to be a company decision and as a developer you might not even been asked whether you back this decision. I think that the community and independent developers might have much more "freedom" in the openSUSE project to do whatever seems to be a good idea. Nevertheless, we as the community should not forget the other commercial and much more professional side, otherwise I think the community's point of view would not be realistic and we would lose some credibility. This, however, does not mean you have to give up your dreams - some of them just might not come true ;-) Cheers, Th.

houghi wrote:

[...] So what is unrealistic about having devlopers knowing what is going on? What is unrealistic about wanting to have developers more involved?

Well, I am not going to repeat my previous emails and arguments - that would be useless and boring, and I don't think you would get the point anyway. So I stop here to avoid any further irritation on this list. Cheers, Th.

It would be a pleasure to be corrected if I'm wrong ;)

The vast majority of bug fixing (for example) work on GNOME issues in Bugzilla seems to me to be done by ex-Ximians these days -- James Ogley james@usr-local-bin.org http://usr-local-bin.org Packages for SUSE: http://usr-local-bin.org/rpms Help end poverty: http://oxfam.org.uk/imin

Marcus Meissner wrote:

On Sun, May 21, 2006 at 01:28:41AM +0200, Pascal Bleser wrote:

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And now, the "general problem": I just don't see ex-Ximian people involved into openSUSE at all.

Well, lets list some of the most visible for 10.1 development:

Garry Ekker and Stanislav Brabec, GNOME packagers. Robert Love, NetworkManager... You like it in 10.1, right? Larry Ewing, f-spot ... working nicely. Aaron Bockover, banshee ... working nicely and greatly enhanced for 10.1. Jeffrey Steadfast, gnome-volume-manager ... greatly enhanced for 10.1. Michael Meeks, OpenOffice_org ... nuff said. Joe Shaw, beagle.

You wisely left out "working nicely" for NetworkManager and beagle. That's actually one of the problems of most GNOME projects. NIH leads to dozens of (re)implementations which are shipped once they somehow work (for varying definitions of "work") and, regardless of their brokenness, they replace old, working solutions. My belief is that some deranged people will eventually try to rewrite yast and parts of the kernel in mono. Maybe that's already happening... I admit I'm too frightened to check.

... and more that I forgot.

All of them contributed to 10.1, answered bugreports, etc etc, so they are definitely involved in openSUSE.

Unfortunately no one of them is visible on this list or opensuse-factory. That creates the impression Pascal had. Regards, Carl-Daniel -- Random GNOME developer quote: "Red Hat based systems (including Mandrake and SuSE) [...]"

On Sun, May 21, 2006 at 08:53:32AM -0400, Kenneth Schneider wrote:

On Sun, 2006-05-21 at 14:04 +0200, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:

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Marcus Meissner wrote:

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On Sun, May 21, 2006 at 01:28:41AM +0200, Pascal Bleser wrote:

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And now, the "general problem": I just don't see ex-Ximian people involved into openSUSE at all.

Well, lets list some of the most visible for 10.1 development:

Garry Ekker and Stanislav Brabec, GNOME packagers. Robert Love, NetworkManager... You like it in 10.1, right? Larry Ewing, f-spot ... working nicely. Aaron Bockover, banshee ... working nicely and greatly enhanced for 10.1. Jeffrey Steadfast, gnome-volume-manager ... greatly enhanced for 10.1. Michael Meeks, OpenOffice_org ... nuff said. Joe Shaw, beagle.

You wisely left out "working nicely" for NetworkManager and beagle.

I disagree. Networkmanager is working well for me. I have not experience with beagle.

It may work nicely for supported wired/wireless -not- using WEP but is totally useless for anything else as it will -not- save the WEP info.

KNetworkManager at least saves the WEP keys (in kwallet). I think nm-applet does the same using gnome-keyring. Ciao, Marcus

On Sun, 21 May 2006, Kenneth Schneider wrote:

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KNetworkManager at least saves the WEP keys (in kwallet). I think nm-applet does the same using gnome-keyring.

Yes it does but I installed fresh three times (just to test various things) and each time after saving the info in Kwallet it would -not- restore the info on reboot. It would ask for the password but -never- restore the connection.

IIRC this is not the first time, that you are complaining about this. Did you actually report a bug on this yet? What's the bug #? If you didn't report it yet, I'd kindly ask you to report it! (For the rest, I'v been using both kNetworkManager and nm-aplett and their storage system successfully, without running into the problem that you are describing.) Regards Christoph

On Sun, 2006-05-21 at 16:40 +0200, jdd wrote:

I would really like opensuse list _not_ make trolls like suse-e do. please be positive or stop. jdd

It's hard to say, since you don't quote anything, but if you are referring to Pascal's original post, I think he's earned the right to speak his mind honestly. His contribution to the SUSE community is substantial and ongoing, and regardless of whether his tone or word choices might not please everyone, raises a good fundamental issue about Gnome's status with the distribution. Keith -- Keith Kastorff kastorff@yahoo.com

jdd wrote: <snip>

the hole thread is going horrific.

jdd

Nothing new after Saturday night :-) -- Regards, Rajko.

Adam Tauno Williams wrote:

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Well, lets list some of the most visible for 10.1 development: Garry Ekker and Stanislav Brabec, GNOME packagers. Robert Love, NetworkManager... You like it in 10.1, right? Larry Ewing, f-spot ... working nicely. Aaron Bockover, banshee ... working nicely and greatly enhanced for 10.1. Jeffrey Steadfast, gnome-volume-manager ... greatly enhanced for 10.1. Michael Meeks, OpenOffice_org ... nuff said. Joe Shaw, beagle. You wisely left out "working nicely" for NetworkManager and beagle.

Work perfectly for me.

I assume you are not using your laptop on battery?

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That's actually one of the problems of most GNOME projects. NIH leads to dozens of (re)implementations which are shipped once they somehow work (for varying definitions of "work") and, regardless of their brokenness, they replace old, working solutions.

Total rubbush; Beagle doesn't replace anything, nothing provided equivalent functionality before. Not even close. Anyone who thinks it replaces 'find file' has clearly never actually used Beagle.

Once upon a time, the findutils-locate package provided very similar services. It was dropped because it used too many resources. Then, quite a while later, beagle came, used ten times the resources and everybody either had to be happy or silent. Beagle will happily index gigabytes of my data *while I'm working on battery*. And there is no way to stop it from doing that except mucking with cron or uninstalling beagle. Uninstalling beagle was faster. I don't care whether beagle drains my battery with "idle" i/o priority, for all I know it could have run at full priority and would have drained the battery to the same amount. Even the old, grotty findutils-locate checked if you ran on battery and aborted if so. And then there is the performance penalty for filesystem access while beagle is running. "Think of it this way: beagle is like salt, not like pasta. You like salt, I like salt, we all like salt. But we eat more pasta :-)" (With apologies to Larry McVoy) As long as beagle doesn't spoil my computing experience, I like it. Regards, Carl-Daniel P.S. GNOME is not the only group suffering from NIH. They just have the bad luck of more annoying zealots. I'm no fan of KDE either, but at least they accept that there is life besides KDE. My desktop environment of choice is fvwm2. -- http://www.hailfinger.org/

Chris Maaskant wrote:

Op zo, 21-05-2006 te 18:54 +0200, schreef Carl-Daniel Hailfinger:

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Once upon a time, the findutils-locate package provided very similar services. It was dropped because it used too many resources. Then, quite a while later, beagle came, used ten times the resources and everybody either had to be happy or silent. Beagle will happily index gigabytes of my data *while I'm working on battery*. And there is no way to stop it from doing that except mucking with cron or uninstalling beagle.

findutils-locate was never dropped, i still use it next to beagle.

Sorry, I meant to write "dropped from default selection".

I gues you never realy used beagle because of the way you compare it with locate. It realy isn't the same thing. Can you use locate to find a persons name in a email or in a chat log? I think not.

You're right. I use seamonkey to search my mail and gaim to search my chat log. Works for me and I couldn't yet see a reason why I should run a third app to search my mail and chat log. Regards, Carl-Daniel -- http://www.hailfinger.org/

Op zo, 21-05-2006 te 20:55 +0200, schreef Carl-Daniel Hailfinger:

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I gues you never realy used beagle because of the way you compare it with locate. It realy isn't the same thing. Can you use locate to find a persons name in a email or in a chat log? I think not.

You're right. I use seamonkey to search my mail and gaim to search my chat log. Works for me and I couldn't yet see a reason why I should run a third app to search my mail and chat log.

I was merely pointing out the difference between locate and beagle, because you were talking about it as if it was some kind of replacement for locate. If i would type: locate suse, it would give me tons of files that contain the string suse. If i type the same thing in beagle, it gives me chatlogs,documents,webpages,emails and personal files that contain the string suse all that in just one app instead of using the search funtions of my system/browser/email-client/IM-client. For that reason i find beagle very handy. Beagle can be very cpu hungry, but it realy helps if you told it what not to search. Anyway, it's a program that you may or may not use, you are given a choice,be thankfull for that :-) Chris Maaskant.

On Sun, 2006-05-21 at 22:21 +1000, Peter Flodin wrote:

On 5/21/06, Marcus Meissner wrote:

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Miguel de Icaza is leading GNOME AFAIK, and Novell employs quite a lot of GNOME developers.. so... where are the SUSE Linux packages ?

Miguel is more in care of Mono.

For those interested in Miguel de Icasa he was interviewed on FLOSS Weekly recently, and talked about the start of GNOME, mono and things. Ironicly it is only available in MP3 http://twit.tv/floss5

How nice. Let's supply it in the -only- format that is -not- supported out of the box. -- Ken Schneider UNIX since 1989, linux since 1994, SuSE since 1998