Re: gnome-apt worry
On Thu, 4 Feb 1999, Dave Swegen wrote:
> I tried out gnome at the weekend and thought "nice for beginners, extra
> bloat for me". So I'm hoping that gnome-apt isn't going to rely on the
> gnome-libs, or that there will be a gtk-only version for those of us who
> don't mind editing config files in vi :) I can't see it being that tricky
> to strip out the gnome stuff (then again I'm probably wrong knowing me).
>
I'll be honest up front and say that I won't do this and I won't take the
patch either, on the grounds that it would clutter the code. I think it's
a bogus argument. If I did Gtk-only, I would have to re-implement a bunch
of stuff I'm using from Gnome, I'd have to debug two versions, Mitch would
have to package two versions. And for what gain? Basically zip. You save
linking to a few libraries, but all that is going to get you realistically
is slightly faster startup time and maybe a little more disk space. It
won't matter for memory usage, since Linux is smart about paging out
unused chunks of library and the main binary will have to bloat to contain
reimplementations of Gnome stuff.
Summary: The only user-visible speedup I would expect from gtk-only would
be faster startup time - but dynamic link time is already overshadowed by
opening the package cache, and if we *really* care we can just statically
link some stuff. The memory usage reported by 'top' would go down, but
actual number of active pages would probably not be that much better.
You'd save some trivial amount of disk space (but if all apps do the
Gtk-only thing, you lose in the long run and the shared lib approach would
have saved more disk space plus had fewer bugs).
Really short summary: In programming, Cut and Paste == Bad. Code Reuse ==
Good. The End.
So IMO this is not worth the time or the code clutter, given the length of
the TODO list (http://www.debian.org/~hp/gnome-apt.html). I'm willing to
be convinced otherwise but I want to hear an actual user-visible reason,
not FUD about "bloat."
Havoc
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