Jeff: I don’t think a “netapplet/NetworkManager debacle” characterization is accurate. Netapplet is a hack at best that more or less simply calls “ifup” and “ifdown” on interfaces. It’s 3700 lines of code. We never intended it to be a GNOME solution or even a cross-distribution one. That wasn’t because of any perceived value-add in it, it was because it was a stop-gap measure to fix the problem of switching between wired and wireless networks in SUSE, given tight restraints on development time. Judging from the response netapplet has received in retrospect from SUSE and NLD users, it was a pretty serious problem. Robert and I readily admit that NetworkManager is a more complete solution, and if you look at the list archives over the past 3 months Robert has arguably been the most active developer on NM.
Now, that’s not to say that I don’t agree generally that we should do as much development openly within the community as possible, but to believe that every line of code from every GNOME-affiliated company that happens to use GTK should be developed openly in public CVS as a perfect cross-platform solution with mailing lists and public discussion just isn’t realistic. Sometimes you have to make compromises. Sometimes you have to write throwaway code.
The lack of a GNOME design team is troublesome. The fact that Novell and Red Hat each have one, and that everyone in the community has their own ideas and that these groups are often at odds with each other in terms of approach or ideology is troubling. HCI and UI is such a subjective thing. It’s easy for developers to say “let’s do API/ABI compatibility” as a goal for the platform. It’s a lot harder to get everyone on the same page for unified user-facing behavior. I’m not sure how one reconciles this.
3 Trackbacks/Pingbacks
Spread that Love
I totally agree with Joe Shaw’s latest blog. Spread that Love! Lets get unified, and take no prisoners….
Sly and the Family GNOME
One of the more interesting aspects of open source projects, to me, are the extent to which they seem to behave in ways considerably different than commercial entities. The open source world is frequently compared to the wild west, or…
[...] Vamos a empezar con netapplet, el último que he descubierto y el que créo que mejor funciona. Esta vez también está disponible para Debian (SID) (no todo va a ser Ubuntu ). Netapplet es una sencilla herramienta que nos permite cambiar la configuración de red (especialmente inalámbrica) a golpe de ratón. Tiene 2 componentes, un demonio que debemos iniciar en el arranque de la máquina (tranquilos que se arrancará solo) y un applet gnome, que es con quien interactuaremos. Su uso es realmente sencillo. Tendremos un nuevo icono en nuestro panel el cual al hacer click sobre el nos mostrará todas los dispositivos de red disponible. Si además tenemos enchufada una tarjeta inalámbrica nos listará todas las redes wifi disponibles. Bastará con hacer click en el dispositivo, o red inalámbrica, deseada y netapplet intentará su configuración automática (si hay DHCP claro). También podemos añadir una red que no este visible e introducir su clave wep. Rápido, sencillo y comodo. Personalmente estoy bastante contento con el. Se ha creado cierta polemica netapplet vs networkmanager como podemos leer en este post del blog de uno de los desarroladores de netapplet. Básicamente dicen que netapplet es un pequeño hack para Suse, que ahora se ha extendido, y que los desarrolladores créen que networkmanager es mucho mejor solución.También podemos leer un articulo en linux.com sobre esta pequeña aplicación. Para terminar, recomendaros que lo probeis y juzgeis por vostros mismos. [...]