Monday, February 19, 2007

Linus vs. GNOME

Do you remember the little flamewar between Linus Torvalds and GNOME December 2005 as he "encouraged people to switch to KDE" and called GNOME developer "interface nazis"?

Now the continuation: Linus wrote and submitted some patches for GNOME to change the behavior as he like it. You can follow the discussion on the Desktop Architects mailing list and get information about the patches here.

Here two quotes from one of Linus mails:
So let's see what happens to my patches. I guarantee you that they actually improve the code (not just add a feature). I also guarantee that they actually make things *more* logical rather than less (with my patches, double-clicking on the title bar isn't a special event: it's configurable along with right- and middle-clicking, and with the exact same syntax for all).
Now the question is, will people take the patches, or will they keep their heads up their arses and claim that configurability is bad, even when it makes things more logical, and code more readable.
IMO he is battlesome as always, but by sending patches also more constructive ;-)
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