Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Mon 15th Sep 2003 20:37 UTC
Today we feature a very interesting interview with Havoc Pennington. Havoc works for Red Hat, he is heading the desktop team, while he is well known also for his major contributions to GNOME, his GTK+ programming book, plus the freedesktop.org initiative which aims to standardize the X11 desktop environments. In the following interview we discuss about the changes inside Red Hat, Xouvert, freedesktop.org and Gnome's future, and how Linux, in general, is doing in the desktop market.
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@Erwos
"myself being one of them, and find the idea of getting rid of X11 absolutely idiotic."
I shouldn't feed trolls but this only reflects how much you DON'T KNOW. Thanks for enlighting me with your half informations.
I didn't wrote that X11 should get removed from GNOME. I wrote to support the backends of GTK better e.g. have it (GNOME) additionally support DirectFB. This also shows me that you didn't spent into reading the supplied link from me and the two sublinks that I suggested people to read. I clearly described there that X11 support should NOT be removed.
GTK and GNOME should continue using X11 but I like to be able to use the DirectFB backend for GDK (GTK) as well and like to be able to compile GNOME for DirectFB.
A bit more conform GDK backend usage would be nice so everyone can benefit from it. E.g. a good start would be to check with configure which GDK backend is used and adding an #ifdef in the sourcefiles so either <gdk/gdkx11.h> or <gdk/gdkfb.h> is being used. Doing this will NOT change anything for you. Writting wrapper libraries for replacing the X11 stuff for those who like to use DirectFB rather than X11 is no problem either because YOU are not affected by it. For you X11 user nothing changes.
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@Murray Cumming
"Dude, that's the whole point. There will be 1 Menu/Toolbar API and all the others will be deprecated eventually. That's good."
**Dude** I didn't said anything else and I'm already aware of this situation. I only like to be on track with the new changes and how the interact with the changes of bonoboui and gnomeui. I know they all wrap back to GTK+ and it's nice for you to know about it. - What about others ?
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@Greg
"150 is the size of the SOURCE. Are you confusing source size with binary size ?"
cd /usr/X11R6/ && du -sh == ~148 mb X11R6 + Fonts
cd /mp/xc/ && du -sh == ~291 mb X11R6 sources
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And to all of you three now. I think you make a lot of noise for nothing as if someone would cut the roots beyond your feet. That was not my intention and flamages would have been easily avoided if my stuff would simply be read. It's not like you three heard the first time about what I like to explain because I raised this point a couple of times in the gnome channel and on the Mailinglists. If you don't understand what I write or if the stuff is understood differently on what I liked to say then it would have been easy to raise the voice and normally bring it up so misunderstandings can be avoided in first place.
Now you all come up in masses defending X11 like it's the ultimative solution for doing graphical things and on the otherhand you sign a petition that X11 should change because of whatever reasons (see the petition). What does this tell ? It tells that X11 is far from being optimal like the GNOME people would have to see it. X11 is a big projects the code is nearly 300 megabytes. It supports many different architectures, different graphiccards, it's still in an ancient IMAKE buildsystem and much much more. Even HP is right when he says that the Xourage (what a strange name) team may have hard times to deal with fixing all the stuff and implementing the things required in the requirementsmap of freedesktop.org. Now who will do the changes ?. I only brought up a far better solution worth to think about. X11 will never change the way you like to see it, not without powerful users. Users that know the architecture and internals of X11 better than anything else. People who develop around it for many years with big knowledge. It's not a simple hackerstoy. We can have different opinions here (as we usually always have) but I think that DirectFB (written by the same people who are behind GIMP and GTK+) makes good sense. While you make huge changes in GNOME you really look scared and whine when it comes to change the entire concept of displaying things.
I do not force anyone to change it but I can at least raise a point that is worth to think about. DirectFB is a good concept and probably easier to handle than X11.