Reading my diary entry of the 25. october, on the interview of the Nautilus, I was not satisified. The entry was agressive, unjustified on certain area, not clear in its intent (too much KDE ranting, too much Gnome bashing). I have rewritten it in a less agressive stance. I keep the response because they are interesting.
My point was:
- Konqueror use KDE technologies (kio slaves and KPart) to provide all its features. So anything available in Konqueror is available for any KDE application.
- Gnome has equivalent technlogies: gnome-vfs and bonobo
- Nautilus 1.0, a core gnome application, provides the same services as Konqueror but doesn't use Gnome technlogies and sometimes even duplicate (theme handling) gnome technlogies.
My conclusion is that the Nautilus developers didn't think it was important to develop an application that would integrate with Gnome. They just thought about developing an application and did not care that much about Gnome's goal.
The interview also gives the impression that Nautilus code os not modular (it is not possible to reuse any part of it indepententely, nor is it possible to integrate external code), not optimised and not very good:
you really need to be two people to maintain Nautilus [...] the new code is also vastly more readable and somewhat better performing than the old code [...] the [sidebar] code was horrible [...] The Icon view is quite integrated with the core Nautilus code at the moment, so it is very hard to do things like this [...] Right now the CVS view has to recreate the whole directory view, which is a pain. It leads to views that don't integrate well with the rest of nautilus (and more often, views that just aren't written) [...] I don't think using the nautilus codebase is such a good idea, as Nautilus has an architecture that is overly complicated for a fileselection dialog [...] The Nautilus views require to much of the Nautilus internal asynchronous machinery, which we don't export (for various reasons) [...] there isn't anyone with concrete plans for fixing the mime system. [...]
All this makes me think that Nautilus developers did not get the Free Software and especially Unix spirit. Unix is all about indenpendant modular tools and piece of codes that interacts together. Advantages of Free Software usually come from this modularity. We also strive to produce the best code. Given all the optimisation that were possible on Nautilus, I think they also missed that point.