Well I'll be damned. With hell frozen, Duke Nukem Forever shipping, and e17 reaching 1.0, what the heck are we supposed to use as a metaphor for "never"?
Phoronix: Version 1.0 Of Enlightenment Foundation Libraries
If you missed it this Friday night, version 1.0 of the core Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) have been released...
http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTA1Nw
Well I'll be damned. With hell frozen, Duke Nukem Forever shipping, and e17 reaching 1.0, what the heck are we supposed to use as a metaphor for "never"?
Come, now. Hell be definitely frozen, but we've only been told Duke Nukem Forever be shipping. And While EFL has hit 1.0, Enlightenment itself?
I guess it's cool that they're still working their way forward, but what I don't get is why we're not seeing a bigger adoption of E17. I know I'm repeating things that people has said a hundred times, but E16 is a million years old and looks like crap (imho) and E17 was a really nice and ambitious idea when it was spawned, but that's also 10 years ago.
Why hasn't E17 been pushed into repos and package handlers more fervently? I mean, Gentoo for instance doesn't have a E17 package, except via an overlay (which is of course a nice way of handling it since overlays was introduced). I seems like the e17 dev(s) should have done an "release-early-release-often"-approach and also should have been working to get e17 into distributions, just to get the user-base numbers up.
Or am I completely wrong here?
The adoption (in distros etc) i think has to do with not being release quality and by that i mean that although it was stable a lot of things could have changed until its official release.
What is also needed is native apps in order to be able to built a complete Desktop environment. Some might argue with native but IMO if you want to offer a pleasant quality experience you don't want your desktop to look like a patchwork.
What i would love to see in the future is: e17-XUL for mozilla apps (firefox integration and why not thinderbird), an xmms2 frontend (yes i know xmms2 is not ready), mplayer frontend, frontend for telepathy (for IM, VOIP, the lot), text editor, photo editor/manager, libre office integration, little tools here and there (ie. pulse audio mixer) etc.
Also a backend for Wayland when its ready
However knowing that they have extremely limited manpower and far less support from companies i don't expect that much except if they manage to built a big community.
How many decades will it take until Enlightenment finally hits 1.0? I mean, they started developing version 0.17 (yes, there is a leading zero) 10 years ago.
Does this mean that with the release of EFL 1.0 they're halfway though with finishing 0.17? If it takes them 20 years to develop a 0.01 version jump and they plan to release 0.18…0.99, then it will be 1660 years before they hit 1.00.
Call me old-fashioned but I'd like to use software that actually hits a stable release at least once in my life time and not waits for the second coming of Jesus to hit 1.0…