No more right click terminal

[Daniel Roesen]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2005 at 11:09:26AM -0400, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On 7/15/05, Daniel Roesen <dr at cluenet.de> wrote:
> > The "we follow upstream!" mantra is also only followed when it's
> > fitting. 
> 
> Indeed, there are several people who maintain and help develop Core
> components. Those people all make judgement calls as to when its
> appropriate to break from upstream.  Its not worthwhile to point out
> that the policy of following upstream is not strictly enforced across
> the whole distribution.

It's only enforced if an easy one-liner is needed to tell people to go
away.

And the customization and many fixes that are done by Red Hat are
actually what we need a distro for. This is the ADDED VALUE.

> downstream.  I can't fathom why someone would choose to minimize
> rather than maximize their impact with regard to an issue they care
> enough about to spend time commenting on in a mailinglist.

Think a moment about the concept of aggregators.

> > The terminal launch option now disappearing completely out of immediate
> > reach is a major blow, once again. I really wonder where this is
> > heading. 
> 
> No need to wonder... If you get invovled or at least follow gnome
> development discussions upstream.. I'm sure you can get a clearer
> picture of project direction and momentum.

With how much effort, just to get something simple fixed? Aggregators
again.

When I as a developer (or actually in the distro case mostly patch kit
and package maintainer) see my users telling me that a change to the
software I take care of sucks, it's MY job to go to the upstream and try
to lobby for a reversal, AND/OR revert this change in my own distro
package.

And actually exactly that happens IFF the Red Hat employee making the
decisions agrees with the complaints. If not, the big "we follow
upstream, go away" stick is taken.

Of course, there are exceptions. But they are seldom.

> I accept the fact that metacity is not necessarily the best fit for
> all situations. I also accept the fact that default choices have to be
> made with a target group of users in mind. I also accept that its
> realistically when defaults have to be chosen the defaults will not be
> perfect for all users.

It's not about defaults. Changing defaults to fit whatever stereotype of
users GNOME developers have in mind isn't the worst thing. It's
annoying, sometimes highly annoying. But removing functionality sucks.

Enlightenment, integrated with GNOME (RHL 6.2, can you remember?) e.g.
had all the bells&whistles I ever needed. Over the years, the window
manager was replaced with ever worse replacements... less features, less
features, less, less. I'm surprised that we have a window manager at all
anymore. So, to get an effective system again, I have to do the
integration work for other window managers myself. Do I have the time?
No. Not the slightest. I have once tried with E under FC1... and gave
up. Never managed to get a nice integration like in RHL 6.2 again.

So now I'm standing here with metacity. Cannot even save window
positions, set positional attributes, nothing. To get extremely simple
things like "drag window to next virtual desktop by just taking it with
ALT key and dragging it around" I need to install additional software...

It's not about defaults. It's about removing/changing fundamental
functionality all the time. GNOME is more and more like Windows. I
feel more and more reminded on times where I had to use a Windows NT
desktop with TeraTerm/Putty all over the place.

And after writing this mail I go searching how to disable this annoying
"paste raises window" behaviour. "Desktop => Preferences => Windows"
has no option for that. I guess such an option was also removed for
"usability improvements".

> If you can't accept these statements as fact, you're head is in the
> wrong space and you are going to be continually frustrated by the
> gnome design process.

I'm not frustrated by the GNOME design process, but by the ignorance
of Fedora folks, at least some very vocal ones.

> I accept the choice of upstream gnome to have
> metacity as the default window manager even though it does not suit me
> personally in all situations.  I do not feel its worth arguing over
> defaults simply because my personal needs are not met with the default
> settings, as long as its "easy enough" to re-configure.

It's not "easy enough" to junk metacity and integrate another WM
yourself.

> In the case of the terminal menu item, its already been pointed out
> that people are working on packaging it up as an addon for Fedora
> Extras.

A lot of work, where Fedora maintainers could provide this with minimal
additional effort out-of-the-box. THAT's wasting resources.

> And I'm sure fvwm can find a home in Extras if a willing
> contributor wants to package it.

You obviously didn't get my point. I was taking twm and fvwm as examples
for extremely simple things which were cool 10+ years ago, but
technology should have advanced by now, but actually it stepped back
(metacity).

How nice it would be to have manual window positioning again when
there's no free screen real estate anymore. But that could confuse
GNOME's Windows user stereotype, so we prolly won't see it anymore...
and removing features is en vogue, not adding.

As as side note, Mozilla just needed MultiZilla to fit me. My Firefox
now has >20 Plugins to make it bearable. Now having to track 20 external
plugins for updates, and compatibility problems with newer Firefoxes...
all hail to removing features all around!

> In terms of re-configuration of
> gnome on a fedora system to move from defaults to "power-user"
> configs,

I _AM_NO_POWER_USER_. I just want to work efficiently with my computer
to do my REAL tasks. And Fedora makes it harder and harder (or the
GNOME folks for that matter, but the Fedora folks don't seem to care at
all, so they are in the same boat).

> Your complaints seem to me more about gnome defaults than anything
> fedora specific.

No, it's about Fedora's ignorance, and only in second step about GNOME
stupidities.

> Since gnome defaults impact more than just fedora, you should take
> your concerns to the gnome project directly in order to maximize the
> impact you will have across a number of distributions that provide a
> gnome desktop experience,

Guess what, I have long done with the idea to save the world. My day has
24 hours, where I'm usually 18-20 hours awake of. I simply don't have
the time to go "lobbying" in other high-volume mailing lists anymore
(just to hear there "then go to your distro vendor... customization is
what distros are there for" - AND THEY ARE RIGHT).

> -jef"i think someone is mistaking assuming i work for sombrero rojo"spaleta

No, but you have a habit of speaking in very authoritative form for
Fedora. Stop playing boss if you don't want to get the heat for it too.


Regards,
Daniel

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