yelp update ?

[Kevin Oberman]

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 3:11 PM, Ronald F. Guilmette
<rfg at tristatelogic.com> wrote:
>
> In message <CADLFttf=tUxw5y4Yte+f=OV2KTZ+_K9UzFHcE1hMzk8iFEfozQ at mail.gmail.com>
> , you wrote:
>
>>>>You should ask GNOME folks why they stopped update the 2.x version.
>>>
>>> I am guessing that they would probably say that it was because they moved
>>> on to work on 3.x. No?
>>
>>Yep. MATE is trying to fork GNOME 2 and keep it alive.
>>
>>http://mate-desktop.org/
>
> Hummm... never heard of that before.  But I just looked at the "About" page
> on that web site.  Unfortunately, it doesn't answer the obvious question...
> Why fork?  Why not just go with the flow and work with the other chaps who
> (it seems) are pushing ahead to GNOME 3.x?

Work on Gnome3 has been on-going, but it is very Linux-centric and
things like devkit are central to it and very hard to port of FreeBSD.

> (Forgive me.  I am entirely ignorant about any of this stuff.  I really
> don't know any of the history or politics of anything even remotely connected
> to GNOME.  I only know that, in general, forks are Bad, because they imply
> fracturing of a development community.)

This is more of a fracturing of the user community. If you look at
Gnome3, it bears little resemblance to Gnome2. And the changes are
very much functional, not just cosmetic. The Gnome team (not the
FreeBSD one) decided that a standardized, non-modifiable look and feel
was needed by Gnome.

As a  result, Gnome3 offers little ability to modify the default
operation. They decided that minimizing (iconifying) windows was not
needed, so it's gone. Last I looked (which is not even close to
recently) they had removed almost all setting options from the
desktop. Much of the user community simply rebelled. many either
reused to update or switched to KDE. While the Gnome team (for whom I
am NOT speaking) has ported much of Gnome3 and many people run it, it
is still lacking too much system integration to be a replacement for
Gnome2. and, if if did, I would not update to it. I want focus follows
pointer and no auto-raise.

>>> I understand your difficulty here. However I am inclined to ask if you
>>> have been laboring under this unfortunate impediment since circa Sept. 28
>>> 2010.
>>
>>Who care about the date? It is a latest stable version. We finally got
>>this bug report in 2012! It took about one and half year for anyone to
>>find this bug. It shows that how many people click on the help?
>
> Well, the long gap between the bug's first existance and its first formal
> report is indeed rather surprising.  But keep in mind that not everyone who
> sees a bug will make a formal report about it.  Many folks who are new
> (or new-ish) to FreeBSD or to GNOME may be hesitant to file formal reports
> because either they think (incorrectly) that they must have done something
> wrong (e.g. during installation) or else they don't want to cause any
> ``trouble'' to/for the developers, or perhaps they are just (wrongly)
> intimidated by the mechanics of the PR filing process.

Actually, a fix was submitted for this on April 28 and it has been
committed, so yelp has worked for me for a couple of weeks and for
everyone who updates their yelp. (I worked with Jody Caldwell to get
the PR submitted, but he submitted the one-line fix.) Note this this
was a one-line bug fix, not an upgrade to a development version of
yelp. I think two weeks after PR submission to commit is not all that
bad. (Yes, a PR had not been submitted because Jody was unsure of how
to submit one, but it only took one message from me describing it
before he submitted it.)

> I certainly would not assume that nobody had ever even noticed that Help
> didn't work before now (e.g. in gthumb, evince, braceros).  It is, I think,
> a testament to the skill of the developers of these packages that their
> individual user interfaces are sufficiently intuitive that people, including
> myself, can struggle along and make productive use of these things for
> quite some time even in the total absence of documentation.  (I knew about
> the problem myself a couple of months ago, but was never motivated to file
> anything about it until just recently.  I myself believed for awhile that
> the problem must have arisen from something that I had screwed up during
> installation.)

Works fine for me with the latest yelp port.

Again, I am onlhy speaking my views as I am mot a member of the Gnome
team and don't speak or them.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
E-mail: kob6558 at gmail.com