After 12 years of Development, E17 Is Out 259
The Enlightenment front page bears this small announcement: "E17 release HAS HAPPENED!" The release announcement is remarkably spartan — it's mostly a tribute to the dozens of contributors who have worked on the software itself and on translating it into many languages besides system-default English. On the other hand, if you've been waiting since December 2000 for E17 (also known as Enlightenment 0.17), you probably have some idea that Enlightenment is a window manager (or possibly a desktop environment: the developers try to defuse any dispute on that front, but suffice it to say that you can think of it either way), and that the coders are more interested in putting out the software that they consider sufficiently done than in incrementing release numbers. That means they've made some side trips along the way, Knuth-like, to do things like create an entire set of underlying portable libraries. The release candidate changelog of a few days ago gives an idea of the very latest changes, but this overview shows and tells what to expect in E17. If you're among those disappointed in the way some desktop environments have tended toward simplicity at the expense of flexibility, you can be sure that Enlightenment runs the other way: "We don't go quietly into the night and remove options when no one is looking. None of those new big version releases with fanfare and "Hey look! Now with half the options you used to have!". We sneak in when you least expect it and plant a whole forest of new option seeds, watching them spring to life. We nail new options to walls on a regular basis. We bake options-cakes and hand them out at parties. Options are good. Options are awesome. We have lots of them. Spend some quality time getting to know your new garden of options in E17. It may just finally give you the control you have been pining for."
Does anyone really care any more? (Score:4, Insightful)
10 years too late, I reckon. We've all moved on from this kind of "gratuitous eye candy above all else philosophy" and it's all about consistency, usability, integration, and last but not least, features now.
Re:Congrats (Score:2, Insightful)
I'll use it, as soon as someone packages it.
No way can I be bothered to deal with all those source packages.
Re:2000 E was the absolute coolest looking WM (Score:4, Insightful)
Its good to see they are finally out with a new version and I hope it gains some ground but it would be hard at this point to become the #1 WM.
Well, that's one of the great things about Linux, isn't it? That it doesn't matter if it's #1 or not. It just has to exist and be sufficiently interesting. And given the very low friction involved in switching between WMs, it actually can become #1, if it's good enough, even though it doesn't have to.
I, too, can't wait to try it out.
17 (Score:5, Insightful)
Can anyone explain why some open source* people have a fetish for tiny version numbers? If you are going to spend ten years developing a new version, is that REALLY not worth a primary version number? What is the attraction to having versions as near to zero as possible? In a dotted-decimal notation, why do some people think only the second decimal should be incremented, and at that only once per decade, and the first decimal should remain zero forever?
The primary decimal should be zero when the project is started and should be 1 when it reaches initial functional maturity. Major versions with substantial new features warrant primary-decimal increments. Minor features warrant secondary-decimal increments. Bug fixes warrant tertiary-decimal increments. Otherwise one of the main benefits of the dotted-decimal notation is lost.
* and not other open source cf. emacs
Re:17 (Score:5, Insightful)
its a e-peen thing, the lower the version number, the less you screwed up
Re:windows has its replacement shells too (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:multi-screen win! (Score:2, Insightful)
Xmonad also has this ability by default. It's the one feature that keeps me from moving to Awesome or DWM.
Re:god, the distros are LAZY, not him (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Congrats (Score:4, Insightful)
Aye it is, but only for one set of distros. What if I can't use RPMs? Building packages is not fun, and even if I did so, I'd still have to deal with all the separate libraries etc.
Just a nightmare for someone who's not a developer. Maybe it's easy enough if you're used to it.