Why Don't We Need An GNOME Installation Guide As Urgently As In The Years Before? |
Formerly I argued that three aspects demand the existence of an autonomous GNOME Installation Guide:
But now - three years after starting the GNOME Installation Guide - the situation has been changed fundamentally:
Regarding these facts one can and must say that the GNOME Installation Guide is no more as important as before: He is of course important as a special part of the GNOME documentation and as step of the quality assurance process because (nearly) all things have practically tested before they have been described. But he is no more important as practically used guide for the normal users. These changings are not regrettable because the facts underline that the general situation of the GNOME development process has been improved. As reaction of this improvement we can say that from now on we will update the GIG only once or twice in a year. This is enough to fullfill the new reduced task of the GIG. |
Why Did We Need An Autonomous GNOME Installation Guide? |
There are at least three aspects which evoke the necessity of a GNOME Installation Guide, one general political cause, one local political cause and one GNOME specific cause: |
1. A general political cause |
The GNOME software is developed by the community. But the prebuilt GNOME packages are distributed by companies like «ximian», «eazel» or even «SuSE». These companies naturally have to earn money (with building and distributing such packages). Therefore, if these companies are the only one who have a description how to build up a stable GNOME system the community would be depend on that companies in a worse manner than windowsuser on MS: These have to pay for that what the company has developed. But those have to buy that what they themselves have developed. |
2. A local political cause |
In Germany GNOME isn't as popular as KDE. One of the causes may be that the packages offered by distributors like SuSE generally are not as modern as possible. That may be caused by the fact that GNOME is heavily developed. But that also may be evoked by the special view of such distributors: GNOME seems to be the second choice. But GNOME is a nice desktop environment added by very nice tools and applications. Therefore a better way to participate in GNOME may be to install GNOME from the scratch using the sources instead of prebuilt packages. But for doing that you have to have some more experiences than you need if you install the prepared packages. So, you need a description how to build up a stable GNOME system. |
3. A GNOME specific cause |
You may think that GNOME itself should and will offer such a GNOME Installation Guide, either in form of an explicit prescription or indirectly by a special organisation of the file server. But if you try that way you will meet many difficulties: There exist two branches of GNOME, the stable and the unstable: In both directories there exist a directory «sources» in which you can find the directories for the library tarballs and the application tarballs. So your first strategy may be to compile all of these packages. But in which order? And really all? The answer is «no»:
Inside the branch «stable» there is - just beside the source directory - another interesting directory «latest». So your second strategy may be to compile all packages being listed inside of this directory. But it is already degenerated into a collection of links containing more than one version for each package. How should this collection lead to result? Inside of the branch «stable» there is - just beside the source directory - another most interesting directory named «releases». Inside of this directory you find a directory gnome-1.4, gnome-1.2 and gnome-fifth-toe-1.4. And these directories themselves contain collections of links into the source directories of the stable and the unstable branch. Therefore these link-collections seem to be good candidates for indirect GNOME Installation Guides. But:
Therefore we need a practically tested way through the djungel of GNOME software, what means: A GNOME Installation Guide, which doesn't want to offer the only one way but at least one of the many possible ways. Of course this guide can't never be ready or complete, because GNOME is heavily developed. For solving that problem this guide will monthly be update. Therefore our a timeslot has the size of nearly four weeks. |
© Karsten Reincke, Osnabrück (Germany) 2000/2001/2002. |