[ale] Slackware to drop Gnome?

[Jim Philips]

On Sunday 10 October 2004 08:18 pm, John Wells wrote:
> http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/10/218246&tid=131&tid=1
>90&tid=8&tid=106
>
> Funny...I've always been a big Gnome fan.  While KDE is admittedly nice,
> I've always felt a little funny using it.  I think a big reason for this
> is that GTK is truly free for both non-profit and commercial use, while Qt
> is definitely not (and surprisingly overpriced, I might add).
>
> Anyone care to comment on why they use KDE rather than Gnome?

Here is a quote from Patrick Volkerding's post that started the rumor:

"Right now, I think 
 removing it would be the best thing for Slackware as it's become a 
 maintainance nightmare (unlike nearly every other ./configure'ed source, 
 GNOME doesn't build into packages easily with DESTDIR). 
 
 Not what you wanted to hear, I'm sure, but I do believe it would be best 
 to let Dropline produce Slackware's GNOME and quit wasting my own time 
 with it. Probably 1/3 of developement time here is used maintaining 
 GNOME, and *most* of the bug reports I get have something to do with GNOME 
 (and aren't bugs I caused, or can fix). KDE, on the other hand, tends to 
 build using the existing build scripts with no changes at all. I can 
 start the build and come back to finished packages in a few hours. A 
 GNOME update usually takes at least a week of manual labor, and another 
 week of cleaning up broken things. It's been a long time (like I said, 
 around GNOME 1.4), since I've felt the effort was worth the return."

I've never tried to build all of Gnome from source, but building some Gnome 
programs introduces dependency nightmares of all kinds. I tried once to build 
Evolution for my Slackware box and quickly gave up on it. Building KDE from 
source, on the other hand, is quite easy. If you have Qt and Arts and a 
reasonably up to date system, it's going to build, and with no arcane 
dependencies to add.