On Sun, Jun 13, 2004 at 12:05:50PM -0700, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: > Michael Banck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > Note that Desktop Environments such as GNOME are not Linux specific. > > GNOME runs (and is well supported by Sun) on Solaris, for example. Of > > course, GNU/Hurd might have a better implementation of virtual file > > systems as Linux, but nevertheless you need a platform-independant > > fallback if you're running on something else than GNU. > > FWIW, this I think is one of the chief problems in operating systems > design today. > > Any popular and full-featured interface is going to need to run on > vanilla (plain posix, X, etc) and cannot rely on whatever fancy tricks > the kernel-level services can provide. And all the various user-land > vfs things for desktops demonstrate that it can be done well without > any kernel-level fancy tricks.
Well, having a well-designed, portable user-space solution is surely nice. But replacing parts or all of it with superiour kernel-level implementations (if available) would make sense as well, just like glibc has general routines and hardware-specific optimizations. Perhaps the GNU project should have thought about a portable virtual-file system library in the spririt of gnulib back then when it become at least possible that the Hurd was not ready as basis for the desktop. Perhaps GNOME is too far detached from the GNU project for any serious code-sharing/interoperability (cf. e.g. the lack of copyright assignments and virtually no awareness of the Hurd from the GNOME people). > Truly we do have a problem now that emacs and gnome and kde and web > browsers and so forth all have their own *different* ideas about how > to do vfs-stuff and how it should look, but that's a problem that can > be solved by coordination, As far as the desktop (I know Emacs can be used as a desktop, but my mum uses GNOME and I won't get her switched to GNU Emacs anytime soon) is concerned, integrating layers and common things are developed by freedesktop.org these days and not the GNU project (e.g. HAL and D-Bus for hardware abstraction, the menu system, the gnome-system-tools backend was proposed to be moved there recently). It seems the GNU project has more or less lost the leading position in innovation and guidance, if it ever had it. The people at fd.o are not bad and quite clueful WRT Free Software, but I'm afraid that in a couple of years the only thing most people using a Free operating system will see of the GNU project are a couple of lines at bootup. Just like it is totally hilarious SPI had GNOME as one of their projects up at their website, it's unrealistic that GNOME is still considerd to be a GNU project these days, apart from the name. > and cannot be solved by fancy kernel-level tricks--since all those > userland tools will need to work, and work consistently, on platforms > that don't have the cool tricks. The GNOME project seems to prefer usability over portability with the assumption that the other platforms will catchup eventually. Thus, gnome-volume-manager (based on the project utopia hardware abstraction stack) will probably be included in GNOME-2.8 although it is Linux-2.6 specific. It is unfortunate that GNU/Hurd was not able to jump in when the need for something like libgnomevfs came up and has to catch up now. Those who do not understand the Hurd have to reimplement it poorly :) Michael _______________________________________________ Bug-hurd mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-hurd
