On Tue, 2005-01-11 at 22:19 -0500, Nathaniel McCallum wrote:
> work.  For instance, GDM/GNOME has had for a long time a patch that 
> allows to choose Shutdown/Reboot/Log-off instead of just log-off.  
> Upstream won't integrate it because it makes some policy decisions (and 
> they don't want to force policy).  However, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandrake, 
> Debian, SuSE and (I'm pretty sure) Slackware (dropline) all use that 
> patch.  We are the only distributer of GNOME in the top 10 that doesn't 
> include that patch.  We can say we are waiting for upstream, but 
> upstream has no mind to include it any time soon.  It is a major 
> annoyance to have to log-off first, wait a few seconds, then choose 
> shutdown from GDM.  We have a build system that lets users determine 
> what patches they want applied, yet we don't give them the choice in 
> this instance.  This seems to me like a bad use of portage.

File a bug about it.  I see no problem with adding patches that improve
the user experience or better integration of our components.  I also
don't see this as a terribly intrusive patch that removes expected
functionality from an application.  On the contrary, the patch actually
enabled the expected functionality from the application.

> Another example is the udev delay.  I know it happened for good reasons 
> (I'm really honestly not complaining), but, aside from DSL and maybe 
> Slackware (and technically debian woody, sarge and sid both have udev), 
> we are the only distro in the top 10 to not have udev by default yet.  
> Again not a complaint, but something that really needs to happen ASAP 
> for computers that support it.  I have to say in defense of the 
> udev/kernel guys, our mixed udev/devfs solution was very smooth.  Great 
> job guys!

Well, wait a month or so and your wish will be granted.  We are moving
to udev as our default device manager.

> Its true, we'll never become Fedora, Ubuntu, Mandrake, etc.  Nor do we 
> want to.  But there are many ways we can improve our desktop for our 
> users (and possibly attract new ones).  I'm not suggesting we should 
> have better DW rankings (who cares).  But we can certainly do better 
> than we are now without a lot of work.

I tend to agree.  At the same time, there's a thousand other areas that
we could improve upon.  How about better device support on the LiveCD?
Maybe better support for mass installs?  What about better support for
server systems?  What about a configuration application?

It is always easy to point out problems, but usually quite a bit harder
to fix them.  For things that can easily be fixed, file a bug on
bugzilla, attach some patches, and try to get it included.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Operational/QA Manager
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part

Reply via email to