Well, this is interesting. We already have a Mono item ruffling some feathers on OSNews today, but here we have the apparent news that Tomboy has become a default part of GNOME on Squeeze, the next release of Debian. Wait, what now? Update: I've updated the article with Fedora's position in all this. Read on! Update II: Josselin Mouette replies.
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Member since:2009-03-31
that's not quite true.
Disclaimer: I'm a tomboy user and (very, very tiny) contributer. Let me just summarize your post from my pov:
You link to yet another "50MB too much" blog post that shows the pixel by pixel "ripoff" (Actually I don't have anything against GNote).
That's not the part of the news item that bugs me though. It's more that your personal opinion resonates very strongly in every line - and that's just a bad idea for several reasons.
a) I perceive this as a news site, not a personal blog.
b) The topic is already a sensitive one, you just add to the flames without more careful placed words.
Regards,
Ben
Member since:2005-06-29
Well, I'm not even against Mono. I just don't care about it, have no feelings either way. The patent situation is worrying, but that's it. Kind of like Austria. I know it's there, but it just doesn't evoke any strong feelings.
The thing is, though, that Mono is an important topic among many of our readers, and as such, it is very much news when Debian includes it.
Member since:2005-07-09
Actually, Thom's argument is pretty simple. Let me remove Tomboy and Gnote from the argument and just use the letters X and Y to avoid the emotions associated with Mono.
Suggestion: It is suggested that X should be replaced by Y as an option for GNOME, since Y has clear advantages, namely Y is available on more platforms than X and Y is smaller than X.
Actual Response: Make X required by GNOME unless you care enough to replace it with Y and know Y exists. On other platforms were X doesn't run, make Y required.
What the response should have been is one of the following:
Option 1) Replace Y with X as an *option* for GNOME
Option 2) Leave X as an *option* for GNOME on supported platforms. Make Y an option for GNOME on other platforms.
Both of these options would have been acceptable, but the actual response demonstrates that the suggestion was just an excuse to push X forward.
Personally, I don't know why anyone would want to use either Tomboy or GNote and I have no idea why either would be a recommended dependency, so I'd likely want to just remove both from the default if I were the maintainer....but I'd be guilty of the same bias of Debian maintainer, which is something that a strong meritocracy like Debian cannot tolerate if it wishes to remain as relevant as it is.
Member since:2005-07-06
GNote is not a Tomboy ripoff. It's a port to a less demanding framework.
Red Hat did a similar thing with OpenOffice years ago (porting its Java bits to GCJ and compile it natively) and nobody cried. The result is faster startup time and less RAM is required. These are benefits on all platforms, not just the ones that don't have a Java VM.
Member since:
2005-06-29
tomboy was _already_ a Recommends:. What happened was that Joss moved it to Depends: but _added_ gnote as an alternative:
http://svn.debian.org/viewsvn/pkg-gnome/desktop/unstable/meta-gnome...
But I bet this doesn't stop people bashing another free software developer...
...which is exactly what the OSNews item carefully explains.