Eye of Gnome comes with some nifty features like support for EXIF data in jpegs. But this depends on a library that isn’t a part of Gnome.
So what do I write in the user manual for EOG?
‘You can see EXIF data for an image, but you need to check the innards of your system first.’
‘You can maybe see EXIF data. I don’t know. Ask your distro.’
‘If you can’t see EXIF data, install the libexif library. I’m sorry, I can’t tell you how you can do that as I don’t know what sort of system you’re running Gnome on.’
The way GNU/Linux systems are put together is perhaps great for people who want unlimited ability to customize and choose. But it makes it very hard to write good documentation. In this sort of scenario, I would say it makes it impossible, and we’re left with a user manual that looks bad.
I’ve added this to the list of use cases for Project Mallard, but I don’t think it’ll be an easy one to solve.