GNOME Foundation Elections Results Are In

PaaChhaa writes "The GNOME Foundation membership and elections committee has announced the preliminary results of this year's elections for the board of directors. There are a few new faces this year, and Miguel de Icaza, whose candidacy was rejected last year due to late submission, is back. The run up to this year's election saw a threat of boycott, which ultimately resulted in the online publication of the foundation's financial records. Also, a heated discussion followed the posting of the list of ten questions, and the opinions of the candidates and other foundation members on these issues can be found in the foundation-list archives for the months of November and December. A notable exclusion from this year's board is GNOME's release manager Jeff Waugh. who didn't run at all."

Mena

[febuiles]

Why the new faces point to Federico Mena? He's been working in GNOME for more time that most of the known developers.

No More Spatial Browsing Please

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I'll take this oppertunity to complain about GNOME's current love affair with spatial browsing, in the hope that it will get noticed.

Please, please take away spatial browsing. Noone I know wants it. Every time someone talks to me about their first foray into Linux(avec GNOME) they complain about it. They all hated it in Win95 and they don't want it now. They all leave with the impression that Naultilus( and by extendtion Linux) is, well, unusable. (They're only lusers, bless them.)

Seriously leave spatial browsing as an option from now on. Not the default.

All replys, comments and links to points of view in favour of spatial browsing are welcome, as I am genuinely facinated and bemused by this point of view. Who exactly like spatial browsing and why?!

Elections?

[HexaByte]

They're having elections? Why not _selections_?

The person who contributes the most stable code get to be CTO, the one who got the most companies to pony up $$$ is CFO, and the one who can listen to the most complaints without going crazy becomes CEO!

Just my vote!

Sun Exclusion -- Java vs .Net?

[Karma Sucks]

It's very interesting that Sun has been excluded from the board since as far as I know the board sets the technical direction for GNOME.

Does this maybe mean that .NET/Mono has won the battle of GNOME? Interesting times.

Re:Sun Exclusion -- Java vs .Net?

[Karma Sucks]

So, by simply lying, you get to call me a troll and be modded up?

- Has Sun been included or excluded from the board of directors? Sun is not there, there were not enough votes for any Sun member to win.

- http://foundation.gnome.org/about/charter/ used to say "GNOME Foundation will oversee the technical direction of GNOME." now http://foundation.gnome.org/elections/overview.htm l says:

Partial List of Tasks of the Board of Directors

The Board of Directors must perform a broad set of both technical and non-technical tasks including:

- Help set overall direction for GNOME.
- Arbitrate technical disputes between maintainers. ...

Google for more of the same.

Spatial browsing and the Mac Finder

[devnevyn]

I haven't used spatial browsing in an other environment than the original Macintosh Finder, pre-OS X. However, the Mac OS 9 Finder is an example of spatial browsing at its best. For a /very/ thourough read on the subject of spatiality, see John Siracusas excellent and by now well-known article over at Ars Technica [arstechnica.com]. John Gruber over at Daring Fireball has a very good take on the subject, as well [daringfireball.net]. Gruber:

In the classic Finder, there is no abstraction between the actual file system and the view of the file system presented on screen. A folder is either open or closed. If it is open, it is represented on screen in its own window. The size, position, and viewing options for an open folder's window are always remembered, and are unrelated to the size, position, and viewing options of parent, sibling, or child folders. There is a clear, cohesive paradigm at work. An open folder is a window; a window is an open folder.

Re:No More Spatial Browsing Please

[Pxtl]

Idunno, I like the toolbarless look, but that's just because I think its nice looking and I'm one of those people who never ever touches the toolbar. I find that the Gnome people in general don't like toolbars and tend to prefer right-click-menus. This is good for simple apps (like the file browser) but a poor decision for more complicated apps.

Still, I agree that the "new window for each folder" thing is a bad idea. Why not follow FireFox's success and go with a rocker/radial approach? Middle-click = open in new window, rclick + scrollup = up one level, stuff like that? Just have the context-menu list the rocker gestures and hotkeys alongside the command names.

Re:No More Spatial Browsing Please

[grumbel]

Complain a lot, write bugreports, cross your fingers and wait a release or two and they might add back a useable textinput/typeahead support. In the past Gnome developers have frustrated me quite a lot, especially in the switch from Gnome1.4 to Gnome2.0 where a lot of usefull features have gone missing, however most of the needed features have found there way back again sooner or later. So I have good hopes that they will fix the filedialog too in the future, just give it a bit time. Gnome developers tend to overshoot their goal of simplicity, it just takes some time to find the right balance between 'crowded', 'simply good' and 'too simple'.

### I can't understand why they won't even offer the old one as an option, except that it would mean admitting that they might be wrong.

They follow more or less the principal of doing it right, instead of flooding the screen with options. And as basically everybody will agree the old dialog was just plain awfull (beside the tab-completion, which was really good), so I think they prefered to dump it completly to have it finally dead, instead of dragging it around for another few releases. Until they get proper typeahead implemented, it will be of course a bit painfull, since 'Ctrl-L' is really a rather ugly hack, however it gets the job done and the dialog is already much more pleasent to use with the mouse, so the damage isn't that big and time will most likly fix the rest.

Re:Spatial browsing and the Mac Finder

[Jameth]

In the classic Finder, there is no abstraction between the actual file system and the view of the file system presented on screen. A folder is either open or closed. If it is open, it is represented on screen in its own window. The size, position, and viewing options for an open folder's window are always remembered, and are unrelated to the size, position, and viewing options of parent, sibling, or child folders. There is a clear, cohesive paradigm at work. An open folder is a window; a window is an open folder.

What nonsense. No abstraction between the file system and the view of the file system because folders are displayed as opened or closed? Since when does the file system open or close folders? You ask the filesystem what's in a folder and it tells you. That's all.

And the 'cohesive paradigm'? Oh, so a browser which follows a 100% tree structure, where going up goes up a level, opening a folder changes the view, and so on is not cohesive or clear? Most people find it plenty clear.

And what is this, "An open folder is a window; a window is an open folder"? So, all windows are folders? Tell that to all the other programs on the system! You might say that they aren't the Finder, but the windows look just about identical, so no one cares. It's the same with any other browser, anyway: A window of a folder is an opened folder.

That was one of the most singularly bad arguments for spatial browsing that has ever been presented. Maybe the rest of there comments are of at least some value, but what you quoted has quite inspired me to assume they are incompetent and not waste my time reading them.