# The dying of a species: gnome@



## getopt (Nov 12, 2020)

Reading committers comments is a hidden source of entertainment if you are a friend of hedonistic cynicism. They pop up more publicly when reading the commit history i.e. on https://www.freshports.org which is also a great source of information for serious purposes.

But folks, it's all about fun in these times isn't it? Enjoy gallows humor until it's your turn.

Once you or your peer group is noticed to be AFK (away from keyboard) you may be categorized as gone. This apparently happened to gnome@ for unknown reason. Maybe they were fallen in a black hole or got lost in a labyrinth.

Sep 8 2020, 6:25 PM
Due to gnome@ being *afk for the moment*, I would like to transfer some of the gnome@ ports to the desktop@ umbrella.

Sep 9 2020, 2:32 PM
Well, the bureaucrat in me thinks "open a PR, wait 14 days, commit". ;-)

seconds later:
except I already proposed to do that a couple of month ago, so the 14 day are past 

a day later:
Well, I think we as kde@ do a quite good job ...

10 Sep 2020 18:55:41
move some gnome@ ports to desktop@
*As gnome@ is lacking active committers at the moment,* transfer some of its ports [1] up the stack to the desktop@ group, in hope that this way we get some updates in as the set of people that "should feel responsible" grows.
*As soon as gnome@ grows some committers again*, this can (and should) of course be reverted again.

Now what does that tell us?

a) Pretend to be at your keyboard all the time. Use scripts and bots to keep_alive.
b) From a more meta-view: How could that happen?
c) If you like strategic war games: How to prevent and fight such theaters?
d) From a culture point of view: How to grow some committers [again]?

Where the prerequisites to a reproduction of little committers is the part of having most of the fun, some relief may be felt when a nursery is available.


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## hitest (Nov 12, 2020)

Gnome is a good DE; it's not my cup of tea.  I know some people like it.  I prefer XFCE and KDE.  Will be interesting to see how this plays out.


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## kpedersen (Nov 12, 2020)

This was predicted unfortunately. Gnome should have been left "lightly maintained" at Gnome 2 rather than ripping it all up and then leaving it unmaintained as a broken, out-of-date version of Gnome 3. It was a bad decision back then.

However it seems many predicted this also and found sustainable alternatives, leaving even less maintainers. It is just a shame because we could have had a *very* stable version of Gnome 2.2x by now. Its not like much would have even caused it to break TBH. This is an area where open-source doesn't do particularly well in.


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## a6h (Nov 12, 2020)

[...] total entropy of an isolated system blah blah yada. But you can buy time by implementing "meritocratic egalitarianism". I bet The GNOME Project has done the opposite.


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## Alain De Vos (Nov 12, 2020)

Needed by brasero,totem,nautilus,


			Projects/Tracker - GNOME Wiki!


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## Zvoni (Nov 13, 2020)

I'm keeping my hopes on Cinnamon in regards to Gnome2.
Apparently, they are active again at freshports


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## Paul Floyd (Nov 14, 2020)

IMO Gnome 3 was a wannabe Windows 8 interface. Over in the world of (open)solaris, illumos made the good decision to switch to MATE whilst Oracle moved to to Gnome 3.

Personally I much prefer KDE.


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## cynwulf (Nov 14, 2020)

The gnome project really don't care about anything except systemd/Linux, so continuing to maintain a port of it seems futile.


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## obsigna (Nov 15, 2020)

I just updated my GNOME 3 installation from 3.28 to 3.38 and I am quite happy now. We were stuck to 3.28 for quite a long time. I found out that the reason seemed to be that GNOME switched to another build system for everything after 3.28 and that must have resulted into a very huge amount of work for the port maintainer(s), and I can easily understand that one need some special motivation and an extra portion of inspiration for even thinking about starting on it. Finally it has been done and I like it. I am relieved because I see a path forward.

Here I want to express my big thanks and my congratulations to the port maintainers behind gnome@.

During the long wait, I tested KDE 5, and I didn’t like it. It was even a major effort to get rid of all its bits and peaces. Why I don’t like KDE and all this Qt stuff can be best explained with a comment of the professor of art, when I went to school in the 70s. He said that simple minded people draw frames around everything like these in obituaries, while open minded people don’t need frames at all. Now all the frames of the KDE/Qt desktop and its applications would easily compare to the number of deaths on our graveyard of the last decades.

One can tell immediately from this that the KDE people are perhaps great engineers, but they are miserable artists, i.e. they have no idea of good design. The GNOME people are great architects which combines both skills, namely engineering with art for making good software.

All that said, I have no problem with people using KDE and alike, since I usually don’t make the problems of others to be mine. I cordially wish you, happy KDE'ing, MATE’ing, MINT’ing, XFCE’ing, whatsoever’ing!!! I will stay with GNOME3. Now people liking i3wm must be special, perhaps graveyard workers :-D


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## getopt (Nov 15, 2020)

obsigna said:


> Here I want to express my big thanks and my congratulations to the port maintainers behind gnome@.


Thank you for recognizing that this is more a gnome@ problem and not so much a @gnome problem.

gnome@ is a shortcut for gnome@freebsd. And maintaining ports is the holy duty of FreeBSD maintainers.

My cynicism pointed to the dying (sub?)species of our own maintainers.

New maintainers are loudly announced while those no more maintaining cannot bemoaned as there is no announcement of such.

As they seem to die lonely, poor and unnoticed, don't we owe them a graveyard or at least an Arlington-like-Monument? That might push the intrinsic motivation of the to be new grown maintainers (see OP).

It's just not enough to notice downhill fluctuation, isn't it?
And pointing to 3rd-party isn't either.


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## Jose (Nov 16, 2020)

getopt said:


> As they seem to die lonely, poor and unnoticed, don't we owe them a graveyard or at least an Arlington-like-Monument? That might push the intrinsic motivation of the to be new grown maintainers (see OP).


You're being overly dramatic, perhaps in an attempt at humor. Old maintainers don't die, they time out. Sometimes forever, sometimes not. They rarely announce from the treetops that they're taking their ball and going home.

Formally declaring as dead maintainers who have timed out for whatever personal reasons would lead to Mark Twain situations.


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