🚀 go-pugleaf

On Thu, 24 Sep 1998 01:51:04 GMT, Havoc Pennington <hp@pobox.com> wrote:
>cbbrowne@news.hex.net (Christopher Browne) writes:
>> 
>> This is a complex jumble (jungle?) of stuff.  And the typical GNOME
>> application needs the whole bunch of system components.  Which means
>> that they're all necessarily quite deeply interwoven.  If one of them
>> "breaks," the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.
>> 
>> One could construct an equivalent list of things for KDE. 
>>
>... 
>> 
>> I don't think that this is a feasible project without going down to the
>> application level and defining things from the *application*
>> perspective, defining user interface as needed by applications rather
>> than (as actually happens) by defining the "perfect UI" and then
>> fiddling applications to conform with it. 
>
>How is it more stable to reimplement the same functionality in every
>app independently?
>
>At least with Gnome/KDE, you only have to debug it once.

This is true; note that it is also the case that Win32 implements lots
of this sort functionality that "only had to be debugged once."
Unfortunately, that debugging never actually happened... 

The optimistic view of the situation is to think that "once GNOME gets a
little time under its belt," GNOME will of course become more stable. 

Optimistically, this hopefully means getting a stable application
platform where it is relatively "safe" to do a bit of fiddling with one
component or another without *too* much risk of making it all break. 

I'm a bit skeptical of that; my concern (that may not be well founded)
is that the components may all depend on each other deeply enough that
changes/upgrades may need to be done in a lockstep fashion:

 "Change/upgrade components only at severe risk of breaking it all!"

I hope that this concern (which would certainly parallel the "Win32"
situation) is ill-founded.  It's too early to be certain. 

>Similarly, using CORBA allows the user to choose which app will
>implement an interface; they will even be able to mix and match Gnome
>and KDE apps, eventually.

That's what I hope becomes the case.  I'm kind of hoping for a "shallow"
user interface and "deep" CORBA functionality.  That is, keeping most of
the functionality on the CORBA side, thus minimizing the amount of
functionality sitting in the GUI. 

Part of the "plague" associated with GUIed applications is that a lot of
logic is implemented as a tough-to-even-describe part of the GUI.  When
this occurs, it becomes an extremely hard problem to replicate the
functionality using a different UI.  In particular, it prevents
non-GUIed control via scripting.  It makes redo/rollback/"macro control"
into real tough problems. 

Thus, I am happy to see apps that are almost all implemented as
"engine," with the GUI being a quite separate thing bolted on.  MH and
EXMH represent a *really* good example of this; Balsa appears to; any
NNTP implementation certainly does.   

Most of the GNOME apps presently appear to be more "GUI-oriented;" I
will remain skeptical until there start to be reusable CORBA bits... 

>I think you'll be impressed with Gnome's increasing stability. Check
>out the next release. (I also think it's fundamentally wrong to take
>instability in some of the current apps as meaningful - they are
>changing *very* rapidly, and that's an inherently unstable thing.) The
>proof will be in the finished code, though. :-)

I hear you.  Can I remain skeptical without being flamed for being an
evil "anti-GNOME bigot"?  :-). 

-- 
"NT 5.0 is the last nail in the Unix coffin. Interestingly, Unix isn't
in the coffin... It's wondering what the heck is sealing itself into a
wooden box 6 feet underground..." -- Jason McMullan
cbbrowne@ntlug.org- <http//www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/lsf.html>