New VTE

[James Wilkinson]

I wrote about gnome-terminal, saying I'd found the Fedora Core 3 version
buggy:
> Ubuntu's gnome-terminal is pleasantly free of these bugs. It may be
> inefficient, but it does what it's supposed to do.

Stephen R Laniel wrote:
> This is where my understanding of open-source implementation
> fails me. My intuition would tell me that the quality of a
> given open-source app would be as good as the best version
> of it that's out there. So if Debian has a good version of
> gnome-terminal (which it does -- I've never had the bug you
> linked to), Red Hat would have a version that's at least as
> good as the Deb version. So why doesn't it work that way?

Well, it's like the difference between Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise
Linux, or Debian unstable and Debian stable. Recent code tends to have
both more features and more bugs. Each distribution makes its own choice
on each package. In this case, I presume Fedora has the more recent
code, while Ubuntu has older code where the bugs have been found and
removed.

I believe that the Red Hat / Fedora crew are responsible for a number of
changes to vte, aimed at improving efficiency (I think there might be
things like accessibility patches in there too). Good things if they
work. In my experience, they *mostly* do, but they can certainly mess up
my mutt session!

This isn't just confined to Linux: many people have observed that new
versions of Windows NT have too many bugs for comfort. They find the
comfort level finally becomes acceptable after a number of service
packs, then Microsoft release another version of NT that's been
thoroughly rewritten (= new, buggy code) and the process starts again...

I probably ought to check just how many of the Fedora / Red Hat changes
have made it into upstream.

James.

-- 
E-mail address: james | ... as Old Father Time is finally traced to an address
@westexe.demon.co.uk  | in Lowestoft by the Child Support Agency worker of
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