Older blog entries for jdub (starting at number 85)

Sarcastic Elitism and GARNOME

mbp and mjs commented on one of my less humourous posts on the GARNOME mailing list. Bummer that mjs seems to have taken it out of context.

On one hand, "it's my project and I'll post how I want to". On the other hand, no other mailing list inspires this level of sarcasm from me (or elitism, but I'd disagree with that anyway)... I never wanted to be a sarcastic elitist, but here I am. :-)

So, what is it about garnome-list that inspires this madness? I've joked for a while now that I built it (blindly and stupidly) without realising its appeal to the one audience I wanted nothing to do with, let alone assist: LFS, Gentoo and Slackware users (I'll leave my discussion about this lot for another time). It also appeals to mostly-non-technical, non-contribution and non-testing oriented people who just want the coolest new thing. You can choose your projects, but you can't choose your users.

The point behind GARNOME was to provide a build harness for GNOME, so that testers could have easier access to the most recently released code. It has succeeded enormously in that role, which is great. But it has also brought pain and horror with it.

Thankfully, next month I start on a new project that will render GARNOME (as it currently stands) obselete, thoroughly please all of my good users (who care about testing), and thoroughly piss off all of the annoying ones (who only care about the act of compiling software - I shit you not). Rock on. :-)

GNOME

I'm so glad that GNOME isn't as much of a pain in the arse as GARNOME. :-)

The XFree86 Discussion

I mailed mharris, Jim Gettys and the GNOME Foundation Board [1] to offer my time to set up bugzilla for XFree86.org again. There's no lack of machine or bandwidth - just interest and elbow-grease.

GNOME

We're on the final lap to the GNOME 2.2 Desktop release, with RC1 coming out today. There have been a few worries about some modules, but it all seems to be pretty good right now. No huge standout bugs, but still quite a bit to fix.

It will be great to get this release out of the way - some modules have already branched for 2.4, and there are already a few new, useful and stable modules ready to roll - check out fontilus, nautilus-cd-burner and nautilus-rpm if you're keen.

[1] I'm now a member of the GNOME Foundation Board. The first two conference calls have been interesting, mostly because they're very different to release team conference calls. It's not quite as... action oriented, so it feels a kind of stuffy and even shrewdly politic at times.

It may sound strange, but the board is almost in the same position as "GNOME 2.0" back when I started on the release team... not really getting a lot done, or going to new places fast. That sounds unfair, but most of the board members from last year would probably agree. It was successful, but a bit quiet. Perhaps it's another opportunity to blow the doors and windows out of a jammed process. It's certainly going to be an interesting year, anyway.

linux.conf.au

Argh! So close I can taste it. Bdale will be in Sydney next week, hanging out at SLUG's Debian SIG; I'll by flying to Perth with Pipka on the Sunday. My talk is on the last day, and I'm fairly pleased with the scheduling. It's just a bummer that I'll miss out on mbp and malcolm's talks - they're both good speakers with interesting topics. GAR! Of course, you should see my talk anyway. ;-)

We'll be taking along the new SLUG DV camera, for vox-pops and interview purposes - we'll probably video some talks too, if the speakers and organisers let us. Watch out!

Life

So I've "met the parents", and they rock. Pipka's sister came back from a year in Denmark this weekend, so now I've met everyone - including the two wildly different grand-mothers. Pipka has had a very different family life to mine; parents still together, good friendships with siblings (I'm an only child - couldn't you tell?), and a lot of love to share around.

We went down to Yass to have a family Christmas, attempted to attack her parents with massive water-squirters (but they teamed up with a hose and kicked our butts), and went shooting on 'The Farm'. I haven't had any practice recently, but did quite well. They'll probably make us shoot things that bleed next time. Ugh. Never really enjoyed that.

I started seeing my Dad again, and left a message on Mum's answering machine on Christmas day... I'm definitely under the influence.

oops - back soon

Do not expose your product to liquid or moisture.

Do not expose your product to extreme hot or cold temperatures.

Do not expose your product to lit candles, cigarettes, cigars, open flames etc.

Do not drop, throw or try to bend the product.

Do not attempt to control nuclear power plants with the product.

Treat your product with care, keep it in an clean and dust free place. Only use a soft damp cloth to clean your product.

WELCOME TO GNOME.

Enjoy your stay.

Metric shitload of GNOME work conquered recently. Lots of running around to the various authors looking to get their software into the Desktop release, making sure they know what to expect, whether they're ready or not, encouraging them to release and see what happens, etc. The 2.1.x series is shaping up very well, and within a few months, we ought to have a kickarse 2.2 release.

Flabbergasted by the amount of work being done in the last four days before the freeze. We're down to about two now (give or take a few timezones), and there's an amazing list of proposed modules and features. Rock!

Also announced the GNOME Power Tools, a new category for all of those geeky utilities and playthings that don't quite fit into our broadly-targeted Desktop release. Massive response, lots of people suggesting their software, and plenty of nominations from users of cool tools. Great to see -> I'm including everything in GARNOME for now, will decide on a release schedule soon.

Much work on the new website, most of my time being spent on making the documentation really sweet. I've been reading a lot of GNOME docs as I've been preparing this, and have been very impressed with their quality. All the more reason to get them up on the web for everyone, and to make them really shine.

I'll be standing for the Foundation Board elections again this year. Not convinced that I actually want to be on the Board though, given that my time is probably better spent working on the infrastructure and release stuff. I'll mention this in my candidacy, so everyone else can decide. Hooray for shirking responsibility to the will of democracy!

I found out she's an angel
I don't think she knows I know
I'm worried that something might happen to me
If anyone ever finds out

Just give it up. The GNOME and KDE hackers have a healthy respect for each other which far outweighs your trolling in value for the Free Software community. Perhaps you should learn from your peers and contribute positively. The rest of us, hacking on both desktop environments, have no time, desire or need to troll.

I find those people, who are at most peripherally involved and manage to represent the rest of as flaming idiots, incredibly frustrating. You are discouraging user acceptance of both systems, so please, shut up and grow up.

The "desktop war" is a fiction, nothing more.

Please don't fight trolls with trolls. :-)

With this post, I am now an Advogato cliché! Hooray for me! Ahem.

This whole "shifting from consulting to permanent employment" thing is both exciting and irritating all at once. I've done consulting either by myself or within a company for too long now, and would like an opportunity to work in a team, rather than having to be the crucial link or driving force. Much closer to how I work with GNOME, really - it's so nice to be a part of a thriving team.

Yes, I'm on an upward swing. :-) I've had a fairly negative week or two all things considered, but it has finished well enough. Have an interview on Monday morning with a systems manager who uses... Evolution. Then I have a couple of good clients lined up to round out the day. So it can't be all that bad, really.

Gearing up for 2.1.1 release. Looking like a nice incremental update to the development series, nothing especially interesting thus far. We're also looking at doing a 2.0.3 release in early November, to keep the ongoing bug and accessibility fixes rolling out.

Oh, if you haven't tried building Mozilla 1.2b with Xft2 support yet, run, don't walk, to your nearest mirror and download the nightly source tarball. It's very sexy, especially with unhinted, anti-aliased fonts. Can't wait for Galeon 2 for yummy GNOME/Mozilla lovin'!

Dude, I'm gobsmacked every day by the behaviour of some (ab)users of Free Software. I'd say you're providing insight into just about everyone who works on it! :-) I've explained it a couple of times to audiences and people involved in Free Software communities like this:

Arse: So, that's a pretty shitty car you've got. Look at how dirty it is! What kind of fuckwit would drive a car like that? I bet you can't even drive it. Can you? You can't! You're hopeless.
Dude: Um, ok.
Arse: So, can I borrow your keys?

In the end, after all of this raving and ranting, the person is still asking you to do something. Asking for a favour. Perhaps it's the medium, I don't know. But on a purely selfish level, if you want something, you do what it takes to get it, whether it's politeness, dressing up, etc. You don't shout and flame, simply because it's ineffective and does not produce results. It amazes me that this concept is so hard to grasp, even for the kinds of selfish people who are so demanding and unkind.

It's heartwarming to have someone to call when things go right. Even more so than the comfort of having someone to be miserable with when things go wrong.

... or this week's most significant evidence pointing to the systematic cynical oppression of the metaverse?

So, today has been a nice little package of bad news... But at the tail end, a silver lining in the acceptance of my linux.conf.au abstract. Which is great, were I even remotely financially capable of actually going. "Oh, but there is this great new Regional Delegates Program sponsored by Sun", you say! Which would be great, were I not the president of SLUG, and therefore unable to participate as both a selector and selectee.

Systematic cynical oppression it is, then.

There is no good reason to throw away so many years work on X - it's such a good platform. Your specific points are so close to being solved:

• Too hard to configure: Work is being done to make XF86Config optional (required only for setups that are too difficult to detect, or old monitors).
• Fonts suck: Whilst fonts are incredibly expensive and generally out of our reach for the time being, the infrastructure is getting a good rehaul with Xft2 and fontconfig. We've still have a fair few nice fonts available though.
• Changing resolutions: Very close to doable with the RandR extension, a side-benefit of its main role.

DirectFB can't and shouldn't compete with X on the desktop. It's a great embedded solution for specific purposes (X is also a great embedded solution), but leaving X for it would be like carving off the top of your head because it gets in the way of doorframes.

Additionally, users don't have to deal with text files and driver names in modern distributions. See Red Hat 8.0 for sane user-admin tools. Very sweet.