GNOME's Horrid Coding Practices | Hacker News Reader

GNOME's Horrid Coding Practices

felipec.wordpress.com

19 pointsdb48x11 comments

please just move to KDE.

you can set it up just like gnome or xfce if you want.

gnome is a corrupt project. tons of nice people, i was one, but now it's full of self proclaimed owners who all behave like this. the design team is the worse... and are hellbent on blindly copying apple.

they singlehandedly harmed Linux adoption by breaking every single application when pushing incomplete 3.0 down everyone's throat at the height of Linux adoption.

A fractal microcosm of this from the dev side is moving from GTK to Qt.

The reasons are the same -- GTK is way worse in documentation and stability and strongly opinionated toward a narrow set of constraints and mobile-focused GUI memes, all with an unapologetic smugness that just leaves you asking "why". (Although there's at least one answer: GTK supports way more bindings than just C++ and Python. :cry:)

Whether Gnome has horrible coding practices is not evident at all from this post.

The only thing evident is that 1 developer is acting in an inappropriate way, although considering the OP’s aggressive attitude right from the beginning, it’s not unlikely that the developer’s inappropriate behavior is a response to the OPs aggression.

It's a good practice to a) split commits into logically atomic changes, and b) revert a change the moment it's understood that it introduces a regression.

GNOME developers don't follow these good practices. This is a fact.

This is not the way to solve your problems, this post does not help, you just whinging, you just manage to upset the people involved

The problem is solved for me.

And for anyone else who is annoyed by the problem and finds your patch. I don’t happen to use a terminal emulator that relies on libvte, but I do appreciate finding patches for the problems I encounter. Thank you!

I have to admit, my own commit messages are often quite terse and my patches on the complex side. Still, I think that I can safely say that I’ve never rejected a patch simply because I wanted to keep my own code.

Trashing open source developers publicly is in poor taste.

I disagree. Mistakes in software like this can affect large numbers of people. It is as important to learn about the source of these mistakes (our own ego) as it is to learn about other bug sources, such as buffer overruns and use–after–free mistakes that so commonly afflict code written in C.

Agreed. GNOME calling felipec "toxic" was deeply uncalled-for. I hope GNOME learns the difference between constructive criticism (like pointing out that their commits don't follow best practices and their interactions demonstrate insufficient care for users) and personal insults like "toxic."

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