joe shaw

Last week I was at GU4DEC, in Dublin.

It was a lot of fun, but more importantly it was probably the most positive GUADEC I can remember. For the first time it really felt like everyone was working together. Not everyone agreed on everything, but there weren’t dissonant overtones that were palpable at previous conferences. When people said “we”, you really got the feeling that they were talking about the direction of the whole GNOME project, and not some small clique. That was nice.

Jon was there and we immediately got together and started hacking on multiserver support in libredcarpet. I think this is probably the largest hump we have to overcome in Red Carpet to really be an accepted community project. Talking with various subprojects people, like Thomas from GStreamer and some AbiWord guys, there was definitely a lot of excitement in making Red Carpet more general and apt- or yum-like.

On one hand, I feel like we have the ability to make Red Carpet the de facto standard packing system for GNOME, when you look at our architecture and the nice desktop integration efforts we can do, like the cool nautilus-rc thing Dave is doing.

On the other hand, I am not so naive to think that Red Carpet will really ever get there. I have a hard time seeing distributors like Red Hat and Debian ever adopting it, even if it is disassociated from Ximian. They have their own (often revenue generating) package management systems, and there are just so many political issues in the way. Not to mention the technical differences between the distros which make them so difficult to support… it’s not unlike the GNOME system tools in that respect. It’s a tough position to be in.

---

I spent a good portion of the day PHPificating and CSSitizing my web page. Don’t believe Jacob’s lies though, I only nicked a small bit of his PHP.

I haven’t yet decided if I like the windex blue.

---

Older entries. Dunno if I’ll ever convert them to the new PHP format.