Daniel kicking ass supporting inotify, fixing rhgb, and the valgrinding. Now to fix all those valgrind errors in metacity. ;-) Oddly enough, I was just watching Seven Samurai on Sunday night. I've been a fan of the movie since I read the book The Last Samurai (which has nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie).
I get that some sound geeks care about things like "PCM," but here is the actual sequence I just went through:
This is just bogus. If the volume control says the volume is all the way up, and the hardware cables are all connected, then I should hear the CD. Period. There is just no excuse for having to hunt through menus for Volume Control and twiddle some acronym-labeled mysterious slider. I still can't tell you what "PCM" even stands for.
Maybe the solution is to robustly default PCM to non-zero (is this ALSA's fault?); maybe the solution is to make the volume applet also move PCM; I don't know. But it is definitely broken if I've never fooled with Volume Control, and I can have the volume applet at nonzero, and not hear any sound. Who on earth would be sitting there tweaking the volume applet, and want PCM to be at zero? That just IS NOT USEFUL, folks. I'm not moving the slider just because sliders are fun. If I'm moving the volume applet slider, I'm expecting the volume to change.
End rant.
Mark discusses notification area and session management.
On notification area: I agree with Seth that the way to fix this is to make it possible to programmatically add/remove applets with sane results; essentially this means that applets autoposition intelligently. I can imagine something like manually moving an applet changes its "autoposition parameters" (left vs. right gravity, or "to the left of some other applet", or whatever these parameters are). So you can still manually arrange applets, but removed applets remember their last position in case they are re-added, and there's a sensible place to put a never-been-added applet.
Then maybe also do a real notification system like the one tigert has screenshots for, with a clear spec and purpose other than "you can put an icon in a tray." I think the current notification area spec is hopelessly broken in many ways, partly because there's no session management as Mark mentions, partly because it just sucks: notification icons are worse than applets for applet-like things, and they suck for doing notifications.
On the session manager, to me D-BUS is the obvious answer for starting desktop components. Just have a list of services to be activated on login. Only "root node" services have to be manually launched, as "dependency" services will be launched by the app that requires them. Getting D-BUS in GNOME 2.10 is a pretty reasonable goal.
Today we are announcing the stateless Linux project, the goal: a uniform framework to cover all common ways of instantiating a centralized OS install read-only on multiple physical or virtual computers. The details of instantiating the OS on an individual computer may vary, from diskless to read-only local cache to live CD. Because there's no per-computer OS state we call it "stateless Linux." The stateless Linux project covers modifying the OS itself to support the assumption that the running OS doesn't exclusively own the root filesystem (e.g. dynamic hardware detection rather than machine-specific config files). It also covers the various instantiation technologies such as diskless, locally-cached, and live CD.
When I end up explaining the same thing over and over, I try to get around to writing it down. So, pretty often I talk to someone who doesn't track the open source world on a daily basis, and doesn't understand the idea behind Red Hat Enterprise Linux: it's a subscription, but to what?
Red Hat has several products sold via subscription. The OS, originally known as Red Hat Linux Advanced Server, is now known as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (with four variants: AS, ES, WS, and Red Hat Desktop). We're using the same subscription approach to Red Hat applications on top of the OS, such as Cluster Suite and Application Server.
The way I think of it is: anyone can download the software from the Internet. Just go to kernel.org or SourceForge or wherever and grab the bits. What the subscription buys is all the work Red Hat adds on top of the bits. But what work is that? What do people here do all day?
Some of it is illustrated by Red Hat Enterprise Linux Update 3, which just came out. This includes:
In addition to the rolled-up mass updates, we have out-of-band single errata (for time sensitive security issues), and "hot fixes" delivered to specific customers.
These updates are a ton of work, because they don't involve just downloading the latest version of everything; the fixes have to be backported and tested. It's the difference between saying "to fix this security flaw, go from Apache 1.x to 2.0" and "to fix this security flaw, install this small patch to Apache 1.x." We do this ongoing work for five to seven years, so if we release a new version annually, we're building up to seven of these updates simultaneously. Needless to say, this isn't trivial.
When I say "backporting" I'm contrasting it with two other approaches. One is the wholesale upgrade, and the other is permanent forking. Take the Enterprise Linux 3 kernel for example, which has many of the key features of the 2.6 kernel. Lots of patches. But when we moved to the 2.6 kernel, we dropped nearly all these patches without creating regressions in functionality. This way we meet customer demands quickly, but don't create a long term problem for those same customers. (As an aside, time-based releases as in GNOME mean we only do small backports in updates, rather than large backports in the initial release as seen with the kernel...)
What else does Red Hat do all day?
Every one of these things involves full-time Red Hat employees and costs money to provide. You could call the full list "support," but I tend to avoid that term since it makes people think of calling someone on the phone for help. That's part of it, but a supported, enterprise-class OS involves a lot more.
Another way to think of this can be found in this table contrasting Enterprise Linux and Fedora. Still, the delta between Enterprise Linux and the Fedora Project doesn't show the full value of the subscription, because we do give a lot of our work away in the Fedora Core releases. Fedora contains our new feature development in real time, while that development is done. The integration work to convert hundreds of upstream packages into a working, compiled OS happens in a Fedora context as well. Even if you use Debian instead of Fedora Core, we're always feeding a stream of features and fixes directly into upstream projects, and anyone can benefit from those.
It absolutely makes sense that we give away what we do, because what we're giving away is the same kind of thing we receive from others: enhancements to the source code. We benefit from countless code contributions from around the world, and in turn everyone benefits from our code contributions.
I think the subscription model captures the original idea of an open source business very well. If you want just the software, here it is. If you want the software as a supported, vendor-backed product with everything that implies, we have that too. If you buy a subscription you benefit from the work that the company does; otherwise you don't. Most importantly, if you can support yourself, or if you want to hire another company that can support you, go for it. Fortunately for Red Hat, many people let us do it for them.
Once it's explained, most people seem pretty happy that our subscription approach is sensible and in the spirit of open source. (Unless they confused free speech and free beer from the start.) When someone remains unhappy, it often has to do with the exact product profiles and pricing. Taking the operating system for example, we slice-and-dice it into four versions (Desktop, WS, ES, and AS) and strip out the tech support for an Academic version. This is oversimplifying; we also have site licenses, volume pricing, and so on and so forth. I don't pretend to be an expert on product pricing, but will just point out that it should be above the cost of producing the product, reflect what people are willing to pay, and is ideally kept a little bit simpler than plane ticket pricing. Hardly an exact science, and something that evolves over time.
One final aspect of the subscription I haven't mentioned. The subscription is to the product line, not to a specific version. So if you buy an Enterprise Linux ES subscription, you can run 2.1, 3, or any future version using that subscription. We have no financial reason to force you to upgrade. The only time you're required to upgrade is at the end of the product support lifetime of 5-7 years; even then, you can of course keep using the bits, if you can find someone to do security errata for you, or if the computer is not connected to the Internet.