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Re: GNOME on cygwin
On Wed, 2010-08-04 at 23:04 -0400, Larry Hall (Cygwin X) wrote:
> On 8/4/2010 6:33 PM, Timares, Brian (HP) wrote:
> > Raul Acevedo wrote:
> >> My real question is what is the point of these packages, if GNOME is
> >> not actually in them. It's a bit confusing and I wasted a chunk of time
> >> trying to install GNOME through Cygwin only to find out it's not possible.
>
> Brian, you misunderstand what Gnome is, since the Cygwin distribution
> contains many packages that make up Gnome. See below for more.
<big snip>
> The short answer is that it's there to house all-that-is-Gnome. It just
> doesn't contain everything yet. With some luck, it will someday. In the
> meantime, there are allot of packages that make up Gnome. Since the
> distribution has some of them now, it makes sense to put them in this
> category. The same is true for KDE, Perl, etc.
Something that should be mentioned. GNOME is a huge, lumbering system
with ten or twelve zillion libraries. Lots of programs rely on those
libraries, but no program relies on all of them. As you port a program
you may also need to port libraries that it requires, and a LOT of the
time, those libraries are going to be part of GNOME.
KDE is similar, although perhaps not quite as massive as GNOME. Many of
the other desktops were developed specifically to avoid the huge
overhead of GNOME and KDE. But of course, as soon as you install a
program built on one of those foundations, you need to pull in the
associated libraries, and take the associated performance hit.
GNOME is also undergoing a huge change. It probably wouldn't make a lot
of sense to put a great deal of effort into a GNOME port at this point
in time when the whole GNOME world will change in a few months.
--McD
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