While DR-16.6-pre7 is out, the much anticipated for years now X desktop environment Enlightenment, sees yet another scrapping of code and rewrite. The team scrapped Ebits and all the applications that depend on it and started development of Edje, its replacement. You can read the rest of the saga here.
Enlightenment DR17 Sees Yet Another Rewrite
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I seriously think that EVAS has the potential to be the answer to Microsoft’s Longhorn. Even without X changes, EVAS will enable the kind of graphically complex and rich applications that will be the real benifet of hardware accelerated desktops.
I think that something Rasterman should learn is:
1) ‘There are NO ultimate solutions’
2) ‘There is NO the solution’
3) ‘Develop, release and do it better next time’
4) ‘Development means, do something, achieve a goal, release it and go on in an itterative process’
Now what did he achieved ? Enlightenment lost the battle of a cool Desktop years ago while GNOME and KDE matured, he re-wrote the entire stuff and now scraped a few parts and re-start over again. We all do mistakes during development, we all gain experience, we all look back and say ‘wow what mistakes I did years back with my code’ and how much we could have done differently than we did that time. But that’s business and life.
The title is a bit misleading. What’s getting rewritten is the window manager itself. A lot of work on E17 has been going into support libraries like EVAS, and those are being kept.
Thankfully, this isn’t business. This is Open Source. We already have GNOME and KDE. We can wait for Rasterman to push whatever graphical limits he feels like pushing. Something very cool might come out of it.
> Thankfully, this isn’t business. This is Open Source.
Business as in ‘life’. Business of a programmer (Life of a programmer).
oh, by “business” you mean “bees wax” as in “mind your own bees wax!” 馃檪
I think that something Rasterman should learn is: [snip]
You can check out the code from CVS. It’s not a ‘release’ per se, but it’s there.
emerge enlightenment-cvs
Or go the long route with a CVS checkout.
Never tired E16/17 myself. Always stuck with the *boxes.
You think it is ‘the ultimate solution’ for a programmer to follow your ‘true way of development’?
Then you say:
*4 rules*
Which are a contradictio interminis with your subject title.
IMO one can decide for himself which way one wants to develop. I prefer certain ways, ofcourse. And i hope developers are open for criticism.
Enlightenment doesn’t competite with only KDE or GNOME who you call mature (what and who defines mature?). I think Enlightenment also competes with Fluxbox, WindowMaker, and so on. Enlightenment can be setup as WM (Window Manager) for GNOME but can also run on it’s own. GNOME and KDE aren’t WM’s. They contain WM components. But theirselve are DE (Desktop Environments). Imo it’s mostly unfair to compare those with a WM. In this case because KDE and GNOME can do a lot more then Enlightement and i think they also aim on different users then the Enlightenment users.
If people disagree, it can be discussed. If that doesn’t work, people can fork. That last is a huge benefit open source gives people, which Enlightenment is (:
“emerge enlightenment-cvs
Or go the long route with a CVS checkout.
Never tired E16/17 myself. Always stuck with the *boxes.”
I’d love to run it but it’s broken here. Yeah, it does install. But ESD is in some infinite loop and the right mouse button doesn’t work so i can only look at some (nice) background.
I think rasterman should go on with his bad self. THe screenies for e17 look great. Just need to reconfigure the window manager so that you can match the background…anyway, it’s his toy, let him play with it.
Isn’t E becoming more of a DE as of E17?
I’m really looking forward to this, even though Enlightenment isn’t really my thing, it was always cool that it existed. =) It was one of the few window managers which were really “different” and just plain amazing (not so today anymore of course). Hopefully E17 will continue in that tradition.
It will certainly not play a big role in the corporate market (where GNOME and KDE are partly aiming at to gain market share for Free Software).
Choice _is_ great and FreeDesktop.org makes it hurt much less.
Enlightenment is what made me give linux a try in the first place! It looked so cool, back in the DR13 days. I’ve been waiting forever for E17 to come out. But in the meantime, Gnome is looking mighty fine and fulfilling all my needs
We’re waiting so long for 0.17, how much longer do you think it will be before version 1.0 comes out?
I think Rasterman has got the version numbers all wrong. In my opinion, it should be called 1.0 as soon as it is stable and usable, which it is right now. At least then it would seem like it’s going somewhere, and not just a nother open source project that died in the 0.x stage. At the moment, it’s looking increasingly likely that Enlightenment will never reach 1.0.
I never understood what the big deal about Enlightenment was. Sure you could have funky windows but all the fancy titlebars just got in the way. Exactly what great features will E17 offer besides eyecandy?
>>We’re waiting so long for 0.17, how much longer do you think it will be before version 1.0 comes out?
I think it’s scheduled for the same release date as Duke Nukem Forever and Windows Longhorn.
I share your opinion, it looks awesome, but the way it was set up didn’t work out for me, back in the day I would use E to make screenshots with and use windowmaker for other work
Interesting question (re: eye candy). My somewhat cynical impression is that back when OS X was first introduced, everyone swooned over the interface and developers took it as a challenge–they could do the same thing but even more and they could do it faster, dammit!
…which is all well and good, except that most people then missed the point that not all of OS X’s “eye candy” was glitz for glitz’s sake. People used to to ding it for the shadows, for instance, and all the “wasted screen real estate”… but of course the shadows allow windows to be frameless but still remain visually distinct when they overlap. They actually reduce wasted screen real estate. The same can’t be said for all of OS X’s oddities (like the genie effect), but even the much-maligned dock turns out to be a pretty good way of both storing favorite programs and documents and switching between active applications. (And I say that as someone who maligned the dock a lot initially.)
The problem is that most of the other desktops have focused on the glitz without looking at practicality. OS X’s glitz factor has dropped with each release, in fact, as Apple has (re)learned that “lickability” and usability aren’t always identical. This is something Microsoft will pick up on again, too, I’m sure. But in the Linux world, glitz can hang on because it’s a technical challenge, and usability has rarely been given the priority that it should be–and both of those things are particularly true of Enlightenment.
I used E off and on for a while and particularly the E16 series really did get usable, but the window decorations are clearly designed for coolness. In the long run XFce 3.x won out for me as my desktop environment of choice under FreeBSD (and yes, I really think XFce is a full-fledged DE, even if it’s spartan compared to the hulks of KDE and GNOME).
I don’t understand the big fuss about version numbers, who cares if one product is v 1.0 and one is 3.0, it’s what it does that matters. As long as progress is being made, it’s all good. E17 is in cvs atm, so not like he’s rewriting it without letting others still use it. If you don’t want to wait, go try gnome, it’s 2.4 now and that is greater than 1
If Rasterman pulls this off I can almost guarantee it will be a beautiful piece of work. This guy is a perfectionist and he realizes now that the current code base cannot and will not ever take Enlightenment where he wants it to go. I would rather wait another year then settle. Meanwhile we are all stuck with KDE and Gnome. Quite honestly, I am not fond of either one. It’s probably due to X itself being a dinosaur that has long outlived its usefulness. How nice of a car can you really make while still using a model T engine?
All those complaing about Rasterman’s development model: If you don’t like it, then fork it. Its legitimate to complain about similar things with reference to GNOME and KDE, because GNOME and KDE bill themselves as being competitors to commercial products. E does not. Its *not* business. Your rules don’t apply. Its about making cool technology that people with similar tastes will find useful. Nothing more, nothing less.
As for glitz vs usability, E17 won’t be able to do some of the glitz. It can’t change the fundemental X model, so it won’t do things like window shadows and transparent windows and whatnot. However, it will allow accelerated scalable canvases in applications. This has a much greater potential for real usability improvements (through richer UIs) than the genie effect or something similarly useless does.
i might have tried this New enlightenment except their new website totally sucks, the way their text floats over the background is buggy and jerky, it did not crash my browser but it sure did not want to scroll very good, is this a reflection of how the new enlightenment is going to run on my computer???…
Are you insane? The Enlightenment website is awesome! Its asthetic (the E logo looks cool, and the background and the scrolling is done tastefully) and the design looks nice and modern. A little baroque, but that’s just Raster’s style. On top of all that, its easily navigable, because all the important stuff is contained in text links at the top. It even looks fine in Lynx! As for scroll, its fine on my browser (Konqueror). What browser are you using?
might have tried this New enlightenment except their new website totally sucks, the way their text floats over the background is buggy and jerky, it did not crash my browser but it sure did not want to scroll very good, is this a reflection of how the new enlightenment is going to run on my computer???…
If you read enlightenments site information – they completely redesigned the site about 2 months ago. In doing so, they choose to use PNG for all graphics which IE does NOT handle well.
Try viewing the site in a different browser for the true effect
The website renders pretty bad under Gecko, as a lot of items don’t mix together (looks like a child’s hobby Geocities site), everything is spaced out to the point where it’s just too much scrolling. Looks infintely better in IE.
I used to use E back in E13 days, it was cool to play with, but in the end it wasn’t really useable. I generally just went to Afterstep.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000348.html
First, I see a lot of people complaining that E supports an extraordinary amount of “eye candy”. If you would take a few seconds to read his page, particularly http://www.rasterman.com/pages/art.html , you would learn this helpful bit of information:
“I do a lot of programming – but I’m not a programmer – people keep forgetting the fact that a programmer isn’t what I really am – I’m an artist at heart – it’s what I enjoy more than anything else – and programming is just a vehicle to get art to come to life – I learnt it as a matter of course in getting art to come to life.”
I, for one, have been eager to see E17 released since I sat in on a demonstration of it Rasterman gave at Atlantacon in 2001. It does aim to be a Desktop Environment but it aims to be a DE for the minimalist. One of the truly nifty features I liked was he would just start typing and an input box appeared to capture the text. Upon striking enter we were presented with an “explorer like” representation of the directory he typed in. Maybe that won’t make the final release, who knows. I just know that E16 is still my favorite window manager and I think E17 is going to blow it, and everything else, out of the water.
An artist doesn’t release what he does not consider presentable. He will let you preview it if you are luck (CVS) but he will change it until he believes it ready for the public.
The fact that we only utilize about 2-4% of the CPU and GPU during normal usage really tells us alot.
There is only one OS out there at the moment that gives users something that they can have without losing performance and/or usefulness, and that’s Mac OS X. I’ve heard a load of crap through the years regarding eyecandy and effects in WM’s and OS’s in general, and that it shouldn’t exist and it’s a waste of processing power. Well that’s not true as seen above. The real waste is not using it at all. Eyecandy enhances the experience when working in the OS or WM and makes it alot more fun.
Don’t agree? Well go back to DOS or your UNIX shell… You won’t need that 2.4GHz CPU or that GeForce 4 ti4200 either so just throw that out the window… a Pentium 100Mhz will do with a S3 Savage graphics card.
The thing is you don’t buy a Ferrari with Wolksvagen interior right? So why should you settle with less in an OS?
my 5 cents…
It’s so great seeing people tell you how YOU should write your code and run a project – when they haven’t the FAINTEST idea of whats going on. They haven’t researched the facts. They haven’t looked beyond what’s just wafting about under their noses?
Now for some facts.
E17 itself is a PROCESS of a rewrite – E17 isn’t being rewritten as such. It’s undergoing what all projects undergo during development – gradual cleansing. What used to be inside the WM is now all split into libraries. Those libraries are clean with extendible and amazingly clean interfaces, ready to expand on in future at will. The WM, as it stood before in E17 CVS, tested out some earlier designs of libraries that started to show their limitations even before it got very far – thus several were refactored. One of thsoe marked for refactoring was Ebits. Ecore and Evas alreayd have undergone this.
This is all done now. There’s thousands and thousands of lines of code invested there – and it’s already showing its applicability beyond just E, the WM. It’s very portable, very clean, very efficient, and ready to move.
Now those libraries have matured it’s time to build on the groundwork created. This is where the much cleaner codebase of E17 itself is being built. Everyone who has had anything to do with the code – from using just the library API’s for their own puroposes, to anything else, ALL agree it was the right thing and what is there now is infinitely better, and that it was worth it.
You can never build a good house without having good foundations. Simple. If your foudnations suck then the house will fall over soon enough. Now the foundations are good it’s time to move on.
E17 isn’t undergoing a rewrite all of a sudden – this has been in progress for MONTHS – in fact well over a year. It’s only now that it’s all come together nicely and we actually talk about our code POST write, not as vaporware.
The new design and clean code is showing its benefits already. Building new things is trivial, clean and “just works”. The payoffs will be HUGE over time. We’re not planning for next year. We’re planning for the next 10 years. The sacrifice is that people won’t see a WM for a while. The benefit is that over time the same codebase will remain maintainable and expandable for much longer.
E is not here to compete with GNOME or KDE. It never was. E never pretended to become a corportate desktop or a desktop for the masses. E was there to break ground. To do things people are too conservative to do, or their designs simply don’t allow. To create a nice slick desktop SHELL (not a Desktop ala KDE/GNOME) to allow a user to run their applications and manage them.
Now I just wish the armchair coders would actually:
1. Know what they were commenting about FIRST. ie follow the code or development and state.
2. Actually realize that there is NO ONE TRUE METHOD to do things. Everyone has their own.
If you don’t know what your are about to pontificate about then don’t go around claiming to know it all as if you do.
Computer counterpart of the Zenon’s paradox should be called Raster’s paradox
Well may I ask you where you see E filling the gap nowadays in the open source community ?
I mean years ago where we had the 3 major Desktops (well E was a border product here, not just a WM but no full Desktop either – but let’s count it there). KDE, GNOME and E years back they had all a fair chance to become the leading standards setter. KDE matured quickly, GNOME matured too and around E nothing much happened for the past years. You were sitting in your own room slowly hacking around E17, cleaned up the code, made the interfaces become perfect and so on while this slowly happened products such as GNOME and KDE went the itterative process, they released whats there even knowing the fact that not everything is 100% but they released it to get people interested in their Desktop to get more people and developers and so on. On the otherhand nothing much was heard about E17. Today we see that KDE and GNOME are the ONLY solutions and future successors of open source Desktops. Even if there are a lot of cool looking easy to use Window Managers but they will slowly disappear in the upcomming years because with every day more people will join one of them. Say E17 is ready now and some parts e.g. the Window Manager part needs to be re-written and we may see E17 final around quarter 1 of 2004 then where do you think it will find it’s place ? Most of the applications are GNOME or KDE apps anyways. If not they are underway to be re-written for either of them using the full KDE or GNOME specifications and full Desktop including WM.
I do honour your efforts spent on E17 and I loved to use it myself years back and you may still have followers of E but imo the train has moved on and left you (… some years back).
Years back when we had all sorts of applications using Motif, TCL/TK, GTK, QT, Athena, whatever are ending now. People settle on full solutions like KDE or GNOME using their framework and widgets. They will raise the question why they should use E and what benefits it will give them.
I wished you had taken care to the userbase as well as you took care for your code e.g. supporting them with new releases every now and then and keep people motivated and interested to join your project. Now you spent all efforts into the ultimate solution and forgot about the community. Now you are standing there with your E and a lot of people who lost interest or do not care anymore.
I know I have the tendency to sound harsh by times. This is no personal attack or something but maybe you should think about this. I do wish you good luck for E and I will definately try it by times (tried it 2 times unfortunately CVS of E17 used an 2 years old freetype1 library which I was not willing to install because it’s not recommended anymore).
“GNOME and KDE aren’t WM’s. They contain WM components. But theirselve are DE (Desktop Environments). Imo it’s mostly unfair to compare those with a WM. In this case because KDE and GNOME can do a lot more then Enlightement and i think they also aim on different users then the Enlightenment users.”
I know the difference between a simple Window Manager and a Desktop Environment. You can go and tell this to someone who is new to open source but not to someone using it for many years.
Englightenment was always in the middle of both. If you look at the E17 framework then you get more than simply Window Managing capabilities. It does far more. If E would have been continously be developed and released in a consistent timerange then who knows. It could still compete with KDE or GNOME. Maybe people would have written native VFS layer or other libraries with functions specially for E. GNOME or KDE wasn’t stomped out of dust within 24hours, a lot of people who got interested helped making them become what they are today. Same could have happened with E if Rasterman would have been able to motivate the community and released more often.
Yes you may be able to use E as a Windowmanager only for GNOME2 who knows but what benefits does it give one ? The entire Theming doesn’t match, maybe WMHINTS doesn’t match, maybe we need to wait months before new specs are being supported and so on while GNOME goes on and simultan to this Metacity is being improved e.g. one core GNOME or KDE component shares hand with other it’s a full round solution.
It renders fine in Gecko here, but unfortunately scrolling speed is terrible. Gecko is great, but some parts of its performance really leave a lot to be desired, especially on Linux/X11 platforms. While scrolling I get refreshes of about 2 frames per second, or less.
Anyway, bitch session over. Edje does sound pretty cool. I’m not aware of many attempts to fully separate GUI from the backend in a generic way like this (obviously it’s a fairly common programming technique), so it’ll be interesting to see how well it works in reality. Go rasterman! We need more cutting edge research like this.
But, the front page news says Edje is basically complete, but I can see no reference to it in the E website sidebar, nor in the documentation? Am I really going to have to check out CVS to get a feel for it?
UGLY
Same old WIMP interface. Been there, done that, seen it done much better. Why not try something truly enlightening and come up with a new paradigm.
I’m not aware of many attempts to fully separate GUI from the backend in a generic way like this (obviously it’s a fairly common programming technique)
A sawfish theme is actually a collection of programs,* and so there is an awful lot of separation. In fact, when writing a theme, you’re practically writing a part of the WM. The concept is not, I don’t think, new. But then, I doubt that any concept is new any more…
*in a lispy, rather than unixy, sense
If E would have been continously be developed and released in a consistent timerange then who knows.
If E had been continuously developed and released in a consitent timeframe, then it probably wouldn’t be what it is or what Rasterman wants it to be. Furthermore, instead of people complaining about the inconsident updates, you’d be complaining about the fact that Enlightenment 17.1 and 17.2 aren’t even API-compatible.
Unless Enlightenment is your project, let the project be operated how its operators want it to be.
Y’know…not everyone wants to be a part of this war that you believe is going on between the desktop environments/shells/windowmanagers.
A project doesn’t die because the developers throw up their hands one evening and proclaim “Damn! Gnome won! Time to stop, lads…”
Take Kahakai for example…it’s a recent for of the Waimea codebase. Why did Waimea development die? Unless we hear from the developers, we can never be sure…but I’d be willing to wager that life caught up with the devs and they had other things to do than spend their evenings hacking code.
Raster isn’t developing E17 to compete with anything. He’s developing it because there’s an itch he wants to scratch…of course, if in scratching that itch he also gives us the most aesthetically tweakable WM/DS/DE in all of Linuxdom, great. If not? Oh well…he’s built some damn cool tools and applications that, if used by other teams, can do all sorts of really cool stuff.
E hasn’t lost. There wasn’t a “war” for E to lose to begin with.
E also hasn’t lost users and supporters. Albeit that many of the hardcore E users from a year or so ago are probably using other WM/DS/DE-s at the moment, but I’ve seen more and more users start trickling and filtering back now that there’s work being done with E16 to support the advances made since its last major release. E still has supporters and users…we’re just exploring other options to see what we do and don’t want to bring into the world of E17 when it’s finally released.
So, if you could, please, get off your high horse and just accept that the world isn’t playing by your rules.
Well said.
I use linux because it allows me to control and tailor my computing experience. I was amazed when I started a few years ago by all the ways I could change things to suit my needs. Eventually this lead me to build the operating system from scratch (using the Linux From Scratch method which btw is in 5.0-pre1 right now, should be released very soon). Each library and program is like a piece a puzzle. When it comes to the GUI, I have tried a lot of window managers, and I even used gnome for a while, since it’s component-based style seemed to fit my with my ideal. However I have found that enlightenment is more suited for my purpose. It’s a puzzle piece that I can change to fit my needs. I can theme it and add or remove components like the iconbox,pager,etc., and for further fine-tuning, since 99% of my apps are gtk, I can theme them too. Right now I have a nice E-theme/Gtk2 theme combo that looks so nice… it almost makes doing work easier [though enjoying my work helps too
] And the kids I work with go crazy when they see the lake at the bottom of my screen (the ripples effect). Maybe this comment had no point, but amidst all the bickering about code and such, I just had to say something positive…
I remember moving from windows to enlightenment 16 and being in total awe. A few months back I was able check out the E17 CVS, and (if you can get it to build) I highly recommend it. It really is awesome. And the code is cleaner than any other DE/WM codebase that I’ve seen. As was said before, Raster is an artist, and he will release it when it is ready to be released. If E17 doesn’t suite your needs then don’t use it, but don’t bug other people for trying it out. E17 really does look great. I use gnome now, and am happy with it but the moment E17 comes out I’m going to download it. I want to see what Raster has planned. Man am I excited!
I personally love E. In fact I was very happy to find LiteStep for windows so I can have that E feel on my windows machine.
The whole point of Linux is that it is an open play ground to build as you will; without having to care if it will be a “success” or not. On my Linux box before it died (my luck with computers; hard drive got corrupted, need to set it up again) I used E16; and my girlfriend used XpDe. I wish there were more developers looking to make DE’s/WM’s out of the ordinary and try completely new things.
..thats just my two cents
A programmer is someone who delivers programs, and rasterman has problems doing that.
If he wants to call himself an artist, fine by me, except that an artist is someone who delivers art, and he hasn’t done much of that, either.
In fact, a common saying among painters is “Paintings are not finished, they are abandoned”. Programs are pretty much the same way, except we can keep on painting later 馃槈
So no, “I am an artist” is not really an excuse.
On the other hand, why would he need an excuse? He is not accountable to us, so why do we care?
if he ever releases anything, we get to use it. That should be enough.
I doubt I’ll ever really use E17. Its capabilities aren’t that important for what I do. However, from a research point of view, I find some of the compenents really interesting (EVAS for instance). In the end we could end up learning a lot from E17 even if it doesn’t wind up being very widely used. So, while I probably won’t use E in the near future, I’m glad it exists.
This type of exploration should be a strength of open source. Because the development is SO decentralized, some developers can try new things without having to worry about the “bottom line”, while other concentrate on current marketable projects. Most of these offshoots will inevitably fail, but in true Darwinian fashion, others will survive to become key parts of Linux’s (or just general computing’s) future.
A programmer is someone who delivers programs, and rasterman has problems doing that.
>>>>>>>>>>>
Since when. A programmer is is someone who programs, nothing more, nothing less. Maybe a good programmer (from a corporate standpoint) is someone who delivers programs, but delivery is not central to being a programmer. You people have got to stop thinking of everything as a product!
If he wants to call himself an artist, fine by me, except that an artist is someone who delivers art, and he hasn’t done much of that, either.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
What kind of lame-ass bullshit is that? If you think artists “deliver” art, then you obviously don’t understand art.
Ever thought about code as an _,Art_ instead of something which has -according to you- ‘to be delivered’. Code can be a ‘product’ as well as an ‘expression’. Same goes for music, a photograph, or a website. A programmer can be seen as an artist as well, because he uses imagination and creativity. A programmer can be a yuppie businessmen as well when he just wants a thing to work no matter how bad the design is, then marketing it how good it is, then selling it, making profit. I prefer artists over those bragging yuppies and i see Enlightenment as a (fine) art, an expression.
Did he create code, or didn’t he? I don’t understand what the problem is with ‘delivering’ it. It’s his code and he shares (‘delivers’) it directly via CVS under GPL and indirectly via releases! So like you say: it has advantages over a painting from a painter in 19th century. Compare a .mod (from ie. the demoscene) with a .mp3 (or cd, from the mainstream music industry) and both the freedom gain / openness *AND* the art are quite obvious. For images/movies i don’t know how such ‘source’ can be shared. Who says the artist has to deliver *anything*? His/her choice.
Sorry to say but when you think Rasterman or whoever has to release code the way you want him too, you have a way to big ego and conservative/authorian thinking because it is _nowhere_ written he has to! And it should not! Artists in Iraq had to make paintings of Iraq… you really think it was their truth opinion and feeling, that they liked him? Or was it fear and authority which decided that?
@oGALAXYo
Theming between KDE1, 2, 3 don’t match either. Bad luck.
Don’t like it? Fine. Talks don’t make it better. Code does. Understanding the artist does. You have choice.
Respect and thanks to all (ex-)E developers. I love E (and other WM’s as well). Warm hugs,
Just a minor clarification: e17 and its foundation libraries are all released under a BSD license (with an advertising clause), not the GPL.
Other than that, thanks for the respect
I think a large problem with open source software, that is highly evident in this forum, is the feeling of many users that developers ‘owe’ them something. All of the current e-developers code in their spare time for the sheer personal enjoyment of creating something that they can use. There will be months when girlfriends, school, jobs, and other Real Life things occupy most of our time, and e development will slow down. Then some of us get free time and it picks up. There is no obligation to produce a product. We don’t get paid. We get occasional praise and thanks, but thats it. As many have said, Gnome and KDE are “more mature” (whatever that entails). So, USE them. There is no obligation for you to sit around twiddling thumbs waiting for an e release.
On to other things
The current crop of libraries makes graphical programming in X very painless. Ecore handles all the X event nonsense in a clean simple fashion. Evas handles the visuals. Ecore_Evas wraps the creation of windows with an evas canvas. Edje allows freeform, animated, scalable GUI designs.
These libraries all have uses well outside the actual e17 window manager, and the majority of time over the past few years has been spent developing and perfecting these libraries.
Anyway, enough of cold medicine induced ramblings…
Rayiner: yes, artists have to deliver art. Say what you will, but if a painter never finishes a painting, he is not a painter, he is a doodler. And yes, a programmer has to deliver programs. You may say he hasn’ t. I say he has.
dpi: Your absolute incomprehension of what you read is amazing. I never was even close to saying Rasterman should deliver as I want, I even said he didn’ t have to, and that it’s not our business to judge him about it.
Also, about the iraqi painter thing… not everyone that puts brush to canvas is an artist, although they are all painters. In the olden days, a retratist was a painter, but noone considered that as much of an artistic acomplishment, until Velazques did what he did.
Hell, painting portraits was the day job most painters had, that allowed them to actually be artists in their ” free time”.
But yes, an artist has to actually deliver. He has to build a body of work. A painter without works to show is a painter only in his mind.
And if you don’ t believe that, then you guys have no idea what being an artist is. Hint: it is not sitting on a cafe TALKING about the art what makes you an artist, it’s not painting in a tortured frenzy and then burning the canvases, it’s creating art, and then showing it.
pro路gram路mer or pro路gram路er ( P ) Pronunciation Key (prgrmr)
n.
One who programs, especially:
1. Computer Science. One who writes computer programs.
paint路er1 ( P ) Pronunciation Key (pntr)
n.
One who paints, either as an artist or worker.
(Source: American Heritage, 4th edition)
A programmer is someone who program. A painter is someone who paints. This is in the definition of English grammar. “Finishing” or “delivering” programs or paitings is unrelated to the definition of programmer or painter.
If dictionary definitions were so important, discussions would last 2 minutes.
If I write one line of code, and plan on writing anpther one in ten years, am I someonbe who writes programs? According to the dictionary, yes. And I must be a programmer.
In short: applying dictionary definitions without thought is not the smart way to go.
Being someone who writes is not being a writer, and your dictionary can say whatever it wants.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>>
If dictionary definitions were so important, discussions would last 2 minutes.
If I write one line of code, and plan on writing anpther one in ten years, am I someonbe who writes programs? According to the dictionary, yes. And I must be a programmer.
In short: applying dictionary definitions without thought is not the smart way to go.
Being someone who writes is not being a writer, and your dictionary can say whatever it wants.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>>
Good god, u people r sad…
let rasterman do what he wants to do, how he wants to do it… if u think development is going slow or they r not taking the right decision, code or fork…
otherwise, put up or shut up…
it aint your project, and just deal with it…
man, honestly, the ignorance and COMPLETE lack of cognitive processes of some people…
Lets see.
Ok first 3 desktops? I never heard of this. I was compteing with Windowmaker, FVWM, Afterstep etc. GNOME and KDE were not even in the same arena. I know it may appear to you like that, but not me. Also remember I worked on GNOME for a while too. E17 didn’t start till lat 99. A while was spent on a prototype Filemanager too (EFM)
E0.16 came out in 99. It worked pretty well and the problem was that there were many design problems if we wanted to go much further. Several nasty bugs were results of continual patching of old ones and never solving it properly. It got to the point where the source of the bug (beyond know the design issue behind it) was not able to be found. You just kept plugging holes. So I went off to redesign and improve to get rid of these nasties from the get-go.
In the middle of all of that VA Linux (my employer) stopped doing Linux and became a “web devel company” (VA software) letting go all its software and hardware engineering. Ever since I’ve been too busy with a fulltime job to keep me housed and fed, and have had almost no time for E. Others are working on other parts – but all in what little spare time they can find. Thus it moved a LOT more slowly than anticipated. That’s life.
E17 is not intending to replace your applications with new “E” versions – you run gnome or kde or gtk or qt or Xt or motif or whatever apps – it’s job is to do everything OUTSIDE those application windows.
So what has happened is a result of 1. bad circumstances, 2. lack of resources, 3. the natural thing that happens to every project and that is reaching design limitations and having to change drastically to go ahead after that.
If someone writes one line of code in a year, he is not a programmer. Not because he doesn’t deliver anything, but because he does not practice his craft with any regularity. You can hand-deliver a letter to someone’s house, but that doesn’t make you a mailman. However, if someone regularly writes lots of code, he is a programmer, whether or not he ever releases any of it. In my spare time, I’ve written 10x the amount of code that I have at work. Almost none of it has ever seen the light of day. Why not? A lot of half-finished projects, a lot of things that are probably not interesting to anyone but myself. I still consider myself a programmer, because I spend a whole lot of time doing it!
The best thing to happen to GNOME was when rasterman was fired from Red Hat and his horrible code was yanked out and replaced. Where was the ‘perfectionist’ in him when imlib1 was written?
Bah.
…when I first tried Linux? (Yggdrassil Plug and Play Linux, for anyone who cares to know which was my first). I thought Enlightenment was a developer release then… now today it is still a developer release?
Second: what reason is there to use this over any other window manager? I’ve been to the site, but it isn’t making things any clearer for me.
Third: http://www.enlightenment.org/pages/shots/g4.jpg is the best example I’ve seen yet of *nix GUI design still failing to follow basic design concepts for ease of use and visual simplicity and following, instead, the hunt for “the ultimate cool looking design” which dangles perpetually at the end of a stick tied to the developer’s heads.