Comments on: On holy wars and a plea for decadence

By: Lucas Rocha » Blog Archive » Notes on the Future of GNOME: Problems and Questions

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 17:57:40 +0000

[...] already) with regards to our beloved project. They overlap in many ways with the opinion of some people who have already commented on the [...]

By: Decadence of the Enterprise Desktop

Decadence of the Enterprise Desktop — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:20:32 +0000

[...] Thomas Thurman – Does not want change for the sake of change. Does not like cold meals because of broken applications and would like apps to asymptotically approach perfection. [...]

By: Thomas Thurman

Thomas Thurman — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 20:33:56 +0000

TeX has solved the problem by staying where it is; then people can write new programs which explicitly are not TeX but use ideas drawn from it. (The examples you give are good ones, but TeX even has no support for queueing certain things and keeps them in fixed-length arrays, in case you’re running in a few kilobytes of memory).

I don’t think that’s ideal, and when something quite new comes along we should think about it. That’s why Metacity has a compositor, after all. But that’s a tradeoff with the instability issue; decreasing instability is never something to bemoan.

By: Marius Gedminas

Marius Gedminas — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 20:23:25 +0000

Hear, hear!

On the other hand, is this actually possible? Look at TeX — it is trying to approach perfection without changing, but the world moves forward and people start missing features like Unicode or OpenType fonts.

By: Andy Wingo

Andy Wingo — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 09:26:16 +0000

Well said!

I would drive the ecological metaphor a bit farther: spurts of evolution, local equilibria, etc. I think that what we’re in for is a bit of a shaking out as a result of changing environment (input devices and GPUs, specifically). It might be not as nice for a while. But maybe we’ll find something better. In the meantime, the old coexists with the new.

Also, emacs is the ultimate software ecosystem ;-)