GNOME 2.17.3 has been released: “This is our third development release on the road towards GNOME 2.18.0, which will be released in March 2007. You all know what you have to do now. Go download it. Go compile it. Go test it. And go hack on it, document it, translate it, fix it.”
GNOME 2.17.3 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
gnome team should stop asking people to submit feature requests, i filled alot of them, only one got answered, the other ones are marked as UNCONFIRMED and my two patches never reached anyone (never got repply)….sadly from someone who loves gnome.
Same here.
I submitted few bugs but no one replied something useful. Some of the bugs I submitted even got “deleted” from Bugzilla (deleted as in no more trace). I followed the bug submission rules everytime and I even included screenshots.
I will never care about submitting bugs to them anymore.
I aggree thinks are weird in the OSS I did the same with KDE with the same results.
It’s weird that hobby developers sometimes have other things to do than bug triaging or reviewing patches? I guess writing the software for you just isn’t enough. :/
Most maintainers do the best job they can, but in the end it’s entirely their choice how much effort they put into it. Everyone who thinks they would do a better job should write their own successful software project and prove it.
Daniel,
I’m an avid Gnome user.. haven’t used anything else in a few years now, but I think your answer excusing the Gnome developers from responding to good bug reports is short sited. Sure, nobody can _demand_ that developers give a hoot about bug reports… but it’s in the developers best interest if they really want to produce something better.
If you set up a bug reporting system, and everyone is conditioned to never use it by lack of a useful response.. there’s no point in having ever set it up in the first place. Developers will become more and more isolated and the project will suffer.
It would be more useful, to look at the reasons why bugs aren’t at least getting an acknowledgment response.. Some of the corporate sponsors, such as Red Hat might find it in their best interest to assign someone the job of monitoring bug reports and at least sending a “thank you” .. if not more. But first they have to see that there is a problem and people who are trying to help are being discouraged from doing so.
There’s also the managibility of bug databases to take into account. I don’t know GNOMEs policies but I know some groups will close bugs automatically due to age, or because no one has commented them for a long time and due to being unreproducable.
You can’t just file a bug in a bug tracking system and forget about it. As the filer you’ve got a part to play in keeping the bug active as well. Some enhancement requests might disappear because its clear no one has stepped up to the plate to implement that feature. Some crash reports might remain as no one but the reporter can reproduce them. And that doesn’t just happen with open source software.
So the reporter needs to remain an active participant, keeping track of the bug, making sure it still exists and updating the bug if a new release fixes it or if it still exists in a new release.
As as aside, I had a crash occur with the deskbar applet on a Saturday and allowed it to submit a crash report. I had an email on the sunday to say that issue was fixed in the next release. I’ve never had a similar response from any closed source software I’ve used.
We run quite an expensive CMS system, and a frequent response to bug reports is “sorry, we can’t reproduce it”.
I think part of the problem is many people have a low threshold for what is considered a bug.
For me, a bug is when the program is not behaving the way the programmer intended or expected. But if you browse the Gnome bug database you see it’s flooded with feature requests or people just complaining that the program isn’t how they want it to be. I’m not surprised that those don’t get any attention. Perhaps these different kinds of ‘bugs’ should be separated more.
I haven’t filed that many bug reports for Gnome, but the ones I have were of the first variety, ‘real’ bugs. And they have all been fixed. The one I did for a specific app was fixed in a few days. The ones I did for various components of Gnome were fixed in the next release.
This guys is doing them a favor reporting them a failure they should fix, every time I see someone complaining of a failure in [insert open source software name here] some one else comes asking “Did you fill a bug?”, I don’t see any excuse, if the bug report was duplicated should be tagged like it and not deleted w/o explanation.
I like GNOME and I thank them for the time they spend on it and a way to thank them is to fill bug reports.
I did the same with KDE with the same results.
Hold on there. My experience with KDE has been very positive and the last bug report I filed (KOffice) was fixed on the spot and was featured right in the 1.6.1 release. Very nice.
On the other hand, not all bug reports I filed were fixed, nor wish reports. But thats the way it goes. I don’t believe it is reasonable to expect that 100% of those reports are tackled.
I will never care about submitting bugs to them anymore.
Try not to take things personally in the business world. Instead of getting defensive and giving up think more positively and join IRC chats or discussion lists and become more vocal in the process. Just because you can’t get exactly what you want isn’t really a good reason to dismiss it all.
While I haven’t submitted any patches to Gnome, my experience has been the opposite with most projects — they’re willing to help with intelligent questions, and given a good patch, often will integrate it.
Simple feature requests will usually be somewhat harder to get in, simply because there’s so much work to do with other stuff, usually adding in one minor feature will just get pushed back and back and possibly forgotten. Also, often the developers are just busy and don’t have time to browse bugzilla for every lamebrained feature request filed. I think the bug rates for Gnome were something near 200 per day (not sure, don’t quote).
If a feature request is submitted, usually a good rationale for including the feature would need to be included, demonstrating clearly why something is an advantage (“They have it too!” or “It’d be really cool!” doesn’t quite cut it).
However, the biggest tip WRT adding a feature — pop on IRC and ask if it’s actually something that’s desired. Usually the devels, if they’re interested, will be willing to help you polish the ideas and give you some tips and ideas on where to start and how it should be architected to keep things clean and maintainable. Talk to the developers.
Hopefully your bad experience didn’t put you off contributing permanently, although I can see it being discouraging.
Feature requests also act as a jumping off point for new developers wanting to become involved. So they can browse bugzilla, see a feature they’d like themselves and implement it.
If you could mail the bugsquad or the maintainters directly asking why that’s perfectly ok, but ranting anonymously in a public forum because your bug didn’t get attention doesn’t really help. I tried searching for anything containing romulo or razor and came up with one bug that was mysteriously closed with no comment. If that was your bug I suggest you reopen it after verifying that it’s still relevant and we’ll help you as best we can. Please give a pointer to the patches so we can try to get them reviewed.
That said, my bugzilla folder has ~60k unread messages so there may be other people trying to get attention too
Some things *will* slip through the cracks. That’s inevitable with the amount of mail the maintainers get.
Edited 2006-12-08 07:18
So which features will be more important in Gnome 2.18?
Does anyone know what new features are they adding, and are any of those anything interesting?
I for one would like to be able to browse my network from Nautilus, like for example point nautilus to computer.myhome.fi (or something) and have it show up there icons for VNC, SSH and such if those services are available. Then just doubleclicking on VNC icon would connect to the machine, perhaps asking for a password. Doubleclicking on SSH icon would open an ssh connection in a terminal, and clicking on SFTP icon would allow you to browse the files…But I guess such a thing will never be done.
Nautilus can already handle all the protocols that gnome-vfs can handle. At least ssh/sftp, webdav, smb and ftp are supported. VNC doesn’t really make sense to show in nautilus, but bringing up a vncviewer from an icon is no problem.
I just basically meant that it’d be nice to have some graphical browser for services available on other machines, and not just limiting it to file-systems.
you’re looking for something like the kioslave for remote places (available in all KDE apps, including konqueror), right? it has zeroconf searching, samba shares and other stuff, including a ‘add a network folder’ wizard for adding ftp, webdav, ssh, windows network drive and other connections.
some of these are in gnome vfs, but afaik no easy wizard or central place to access them… gnome has the same problem KDE has – the nice features are sometimes hard to discover. both are working on this, of course, by removing them or making them easier to discover
by removing them or making them easier to discover
Geez, will you ever stop trolling in GNOME topics?
shame on you KDE contributor.
you can make of that whatever you want…
and whatever you make of it, i’m sure both KDE and Gnome sometimes remove features, tough the latter might do it more often.
in KDE, i miss my ‘show closebutton on mouseover on tab’ in konqueror (tough it’s still available in the config file, just like many gnome features are still available using gconf). and there are sure more things like this…
You can already browse *mounted* shares, but the feature you’re talking about would require some extra thought. For one, how would Nautilus know what machines offered which services? For a solution like you propose, there would have to be some avahi like discovery of vnc/ssh/sftp etc … relatively trivial, but the impact becomes much larger, involving multiple projects, multiple release schedules etc.
Perhaps file a feature request and see if there’s enough demand in the various projects?
Nautilus already has this capability. You can browse an entire network of SSH/SFTP, FTP, WebDAV, etc. But it can only automatically find those shares if they’re advertised with DNS-SD (a.k.a. Bonjour a.k.a. Rendezvous).
Unfortunately, none of the distros (that I know of) set things up to advertise these things over DNS-SD. When I browse the network at work with Nautilus, I see all the Macs I can SSH into, but none of the Linux boxes.
You may be interested in checking out the Avahi project. It’s rather new, so it has not been integrated into many distributions yet. It is very similar to Apple’s production-ready Bonjour.
In particulate, I have seen a “service discovery” program for Avahi that shows what services are advertised on the network. It will nice if this becomes a standard tool, but you can get it now with a little work.
http://avahi.org/wiki/AdministrativeAvahiApplication
kde, rocks
gnome,shocks
this type of posting is stupidity.
PS. I use KDE, but better Gnome is no problem for me ;]
this type of posting is stupidity.
PS. I use KDE, but better Gnome is no problem for me ;]
I use GNOME but a better KDE would be great for me too as an improvement in either means a better opendesktop.