Older blog entries for aaronl (starting at number 55)

itp: Suit yourself. I'll use the programs that I want to use. As for your claims that "one extra dependecy" is resonable:

gnome-bin gnome-core gnome-libs-data libgdk-pixbuf2 libgnome32 libgnomesupport0 libgnomeui32 libgnorba27 libgnorbagtk0

...looks like a hell of a lot more than one dependency to me. If it was one library, I might not mind as much. This is not even including the libraries that the Gnome libraries depend on, such as audiofile, esd, etc.

itp: Wow, you really ARE an idiot. Considering the fact that only very few programs on my system use Gnome libraries, shared memory has nothing to do with this at all. It is extremely unlikely that I would run two Gnome apps at one time. Now, you claim that Gnome has advantages?? Consistany of interface? HAHAH! Let's make some completely unrelated applications have exactly the same interface for doing different things! No thanks. I do not care for the ugliness or so-called "features" of gnome-libs. Therefore, I have decided it has no purpose on my system other than trying to convince me to run that crappy desktop environment. And therefore, it must go. Considering the fact that only a few applications on my system use Gnome, this is not such a hard task. I am doing it for my personal convenience and for others who want a gnomeless system. Freedom of choice is a good thing, but the Gnome developers don't seem to think so.

You go develop applications for Gnome and have fun. Unfortunately, many people will not use them. And it will also make you look like an idiot for not seperating your engine code from your sissy desktop Windows 95 emulation. But then again, it is far too late for anyone who has read this to not think you're an idiot or ever have their mind changed, so that shouldn't matter much.

itp: excuse me? Wait, you work for that company that is trying to blow APT out of the water with a tool that runs only on their desktop environment? And only under X? BWUHAHAHAH. That explains it.

gilbertt: heh

bma: yeah, I would present my rebuttal to this here except we met on IRC today and straightened it out.

Uraeus: BTW, I AM an AbiWord developer. I believe that feedback is very important to the development process and I make a point of reporting even bugs that I might fix. I was disappointed with the current release, and I wanted to make my troubles known. If I hadn't done that, as you pointed out, it would be a lot harder to fix them.

Also, I forked the debian sawfish package today. Due to the maintainer's total lack of clue, I have made my own version that does not link with Gnome. To get it, put in your sources.list:

deb http://vitelus.com/debian unstable main deb-src http://vitelus.com/debian unstable main

Sorry, i386 only at this time.

I sent the patch to jasta, and fortunately it worked fine for him. He applied it to the devel tree and completely rewrote many of the things that I did poorly. Things are going at a great pace and I've been pleased with the level of cooperation from the maintainer and support from the community for this patch.

Major progress on Gnapster work. Two days ago I got one file ported. Yesterday I got all files ported and the application linking. The program even mostly worked. Today it REALLY works -- the biggest deficiency I can find is the lack of an about box (which is being worked on at the moment). It took about 5 minutes to port the patch forward to the current development version of Gnapster. Tomorrow I will send a patch to the maintainer.

I have sucessfully ported Gnapster to Gtk. I have a tree on my system that will link either with or without gnome. The GTK interface need a little polishing and fixing, but it basically works. The whole project was 10 hours of work, split across about 30 hours of Real Life. We expect the changes to go into the next release of Gnapster. However, there are some licensing concerns that will have to be cleared up before then :(

The diff is currently 55k. Tomorrow I will fix the final issues so that popups actually do the function you select, and diaogs also work.

This was a cool little project, and I will probably be doing some long-term work on Gnapster too.

Wonder if the RIAA will come after me.

Here's some amunition for the anti-Gnome crusade:

  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT  LIB %CPU %MEM
TIME COMMAND

22015 aaronl    11   0  3228 3228  2432 S       0  0.1  2.5
 0:00 lame

22033 aaronl     8   0  2504 2504  1916 S       0  0.1  1.9
 0:00 unlame

(Stupid mozilla likes to force line wrapping)

lame is the "hello world" Gnome application which opens a window with two buttons. unlame is a GTK app that opens up a window with one button (ooh, big difference!!!). As you can see, the Gnome application is much larger becuase it has to load all of the Gnome libraries (that hopefully nothing on my system is using). Anyone who doesn't care about 500k can piss off.

My hitlist:

gabber
gnapster
yamt
pan

These are applications I use that require Gnome. Please someone help out and implement patches to make them plain GTK so I can get rid of megs and megs of crufty Gnome libraries.

Sorry for not posting for so long. Today I started working on a list mode for EFM. It's been suprizingly easy so far, and I'm worrying that the last 10% may be 90% of the work. I haven't told raster yet since I haven't been able to contact him, but I'll discuss it with him and mandrake tomorrow.

Since my last diary entry I have made minor contributions to XMMS, X-Chat, and hxd. I'm enjoying this variety, and plan to work more on miscellaneous applications that I find useful such as these.

VA hasn't been working me too hard, and I've been having a great time. As August draws near I am wondering how I will ever be able to go back to school in September :-(.

I've had some adventures with web browsers lately. My self-imposed policy of only using free applications at work has forced me into mozilla, and I've been looking for alternatives. I checked out GtkHTML from CVS, and I must say that it is the fastest graphical HTML engine I have ever used. I'm very excited about this project. But I'm quite bitter that they made something so useful depend on Gnome. Silly helixcode people :(. The stuff in CVS is nicely experimental, but I don't dare use it for everyday surfing. Mozilla is holding up well for that, and I'm reporting all of the problems I run into. I still have major ideological problems with mozilla, as I like small and fast applications but mozilla implements its own whole damn toolkit. As for speed, it seems to implement its dialogs in JavaScript. Yuck. The developers claim that if not for this aproach, it would only have been developed on Win32, but Mozilla sucks so much more than Comunicator 4.x (which used sane, native, consistant widgets) that I really have my doubts.