On Mon, 2005-01-10 at 21:50 -0800, M. Edward Borasky wrote: > Well ... if you've seen one KDE or Enlightenment desktop, you've pretty > much seen them all, eh? :) I guess I would ask mostly for more > "branding" -- Gentoo themes, eye candy, etc. -- and some more nifty GUI > tools integrated with Portage and the Gentoo-specific configuration > options. A graphic "ufed", for example, would be nice.
Oh Goddess... You just opened up a can of worms rivaling the ozone hole. Gentoo has some very firm camps on branding. On one side, we have the "Everything in Gentoo should be as close to upstream as possible!" and on the other side the "Gentoo brand everything!" guys. I wouldn't mind seeing a bit more branding, provided it didn't get to the point of being ridiculous (read Red Hat). I think the Gnome team has done a good job of finding a middle ground. Could we benefit from some sort of "branding" USE flag? I think so. As for the GUI tools, well, here's my take on it, taken from the gentoo-catalyst mailing list when someone asked about a graphical spec-file creation tool for catalyst. "It really boils down to one thing. Would you rather us stop working on catalyst and focus on making a GUI for it which would be inflexible and only capable of limited functionality, or would you rather us spend our time improving catalyst with new features and better documentation? Anyone can write a GUI for catalyst, especially a GUI for creating spec files. Remember that spec-file creation is *not* a function of catalyst, at all. The spec-files are simply used by catalyst. Therefore a GUI spec-file builder does not have to be tied to catalyst's development in any way, other than to offer all the options that catalyst does." The same thing can be said about portage and make.conf, as portage doesn't create this file, it only uses it. That is why projects like ufed or profuse have been so successful... they don't have to be written by the portage developers or tied directly into portage. They can be improved upon independent of the work going into portage. -- Chris Gianelloni Release Engineering - Operational/QA Manager Games - Developer Gentoo Linux
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