All is not well in the land of GNOME

If you haven't been following the news, basically someone said this. Which lead to this, and also this.

I don't really follow GNOME internals much, but I've seen this before. From the recent *BSD riots on lkml to the Ice Weasel debate, arguably less-than-civil discourse is common and perhaps even somewhat cyclical in the open source world. And while detractors might often sight this as an ugly side-effect of that untamed, unprofessional domain, in a way, the anger is what makes open source work.

Open source types display a sort of militancy about what they do. They take threats to their project personally. Its the kind of investment in a project that just doesn't grow when a company is the owner of everything you do. Not only do we have the firm opinion that We are Right, and that by extension They are Wrong, we tend to believe that being Wrong is by further extension Evil. We've extended that pretty far, but its a principle that recurs often in the human condition. In the US people have been getting a fresh look at this idea for some time now. Take this case of a couple of boys who were suspended recently for using the word "noose." Its not the first case we've heard like this, and it won't be the last, but it is a demonstration of an idea that the American public is growing much more aware of these days: A policy doesn't have to be directly evil to cause you real, deep injury. Incompetency does the trick. If your child's well being was on the line, I doubt you'd spare the inept any of the hard words you were saving for the guilty. The fact that we take our desktop environments just as seriously is to the credit of open source.

Why is the kernel such a well-written piece of software? Is it the brilliance of Linus? The no-nonsense design philosophy? These are important, but they'd be meaningless if not for the fact that Linus will not take your shit! Even Ingo Molnar, who has been earning plenty of well-deserved praise for CFS, has had Linus spit a patch back at him on at least one occasion I observed, with a thick stream of harsh words following it (if anyone knows where in the lkml archives I could find the email I'm thinking of, please post it). Expectations are high, and even mediocrity, even second best, is an insult to what we've put in so far. That's the mantra of open source. Brutal? Sometimes. But it makes great software.

If Murray doesn't feel like bullshitting Waugh to get something out of him, or doesn't think the bullshit would buy him anything anyway, then so much the better. If it devolves into a raging conflict, so much the better. A good slap upside the head keeps people alert, and if we have to do it, best we all do each other at once.We're being held to our own standards, all our names go out on every one person's work. We can't give ourselves a moments rest, nor can we give rest to our comrades.

List of ideas

Here's some projects I would like to do but probably won't get around to for some time:

SysObject
The idea here is to create a system administration toolkit in either ruby or python that would allow you to administer a system via method calls on an object. Think of it as sort of a what-if-physical-computers-were-dbus-services scenario. For example, consider the following admin script:


SysObject::ObjectSpace.login("username","password") do |objectSpace|
boxA = objectSpace["webServer1"]
boxB = objectSpace["webServer2"]

boxA.httpServices["phpBB"].useDatabase boxB.services['mysql'].schemas['phpBBschema']
boxA.services["apache"].AllowOverride = "none"
boxB.reboot
end


Another relational filesystem
There's been some people who have tried this before (WinFS etc) but few people have found a good way to make the data available. Much as I tend to dislike XML, I think XPath is one of the better solutions to this. It offers the perfect mechanism for relatively succinct queries and is also a superset of conventional unix file paths.

A new programming language
I think C is in need of a bit of a refresh. The reason that this hasn't happened is people have gotten distracted with VHLs and other interpreted languages that are better for a subset of tasks, but still ignore some bits of C's use cases. A version of C that got rid of some of the curly braces, had a more powerful preprocessor (yes, more preprocessor. And by more powerful I mean implement-your-own-language-in-it powerful), and got rid of the whole horrible include system and function predeclarations would fit the bill.

Well there's that. Enjoy!