Re: for the GNOME hater in all of us...

[simon@example.com (Simon Cozens)]

Christopher Sekiya (lists.tlug):
>GNOME (and KDE) have too many moving parts.

Uhm, that's kind of a blanket statement without much in the way of
explanation or justification, so it's hard to know how to respond to it.

Do you mean that the API keeps changing? If so, then I know that's not
the case for GNOME - after 1.1, all the parts were pretty much nailed
down: the Bonobo interface isn't going to changed, we've standardised on
gdkpixmap instead of Imlib and that's fixed, and the core API's now
stable enough that it's not going anywhere either. I know nothing about
KDE, but I'm under the impression that 2.0 is stable now as well.

Do you mean that the libraries are constantly updated? Well, this is
called development. 

Do you mean that there are too many separate files? This is to encourage
maintainability. It also helps the user when upgrading; I'm blowed if I
want to download a big ol' tarball containing everything when the
printer system gets a minor tweak. (Especially since I don't have a
printer!) It also helps hackers - isolating and compartmentalising code
is extremely useful to avoid requiring a holistic understanding of the
system before you can work on anything. And at what cost? You have a lot
of separate files. Oh. Big deal.

-- 
Simon:  `hello kitty' douche. If you are getting some and you know what
hello kitty is... Well, you're an exceptionally lucky man.
  -- Megahal, trained on IRC.