A cautionary word about GNOME Do 0.6

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

The GNOME Do team released version 0.6 a couple of weeks ago, and I haven’t blogged about it because I have not been able to recommend that people upgrade due to some pretty heinous bugs. I stepped down from the project shortly after 0.5 was released, and releases that I cannot endorse have been made in my absence. I was going to remain silent until a sufficiently stable release was available, but a recent update has many people asking for an explanation for Do’s decline in stability.

The Do team is doing fantastic work, some of which includes addressing longstanding deficiencies in my original design. This work has affected some of the most fragile pieces of Do’s core architecture, and has roused some critical bugs. While I had chosen to put off this delicate work, the Do team courageously confronted these issues for the long-term health of the project. Unfortunately, premature releases were made to larger-than-anticipated audiences. For many of you, Do has become a pillar of your GNU/Linux desktop, and I apologize for this momentary lapse in a consistent history of solid, stable releases. We believe that the instability is affecting only a small population of users, so many of you should find 0.6 to be a speedy, stable, evolutionary release. For those of you experiencing intermittent crashes or abnormal memory usage, please bear with the Do team as they make this tough transition. I encourage you to continue using Do 0.5.0.1 if your experience with the newer releases has been negative.

9 comments

Jonathan wrote,

You should have probably warned the Ubuntu peoples about it, because it’s already packaged and ready to go for Ubuntu Intrepid! So it looks like the awesomeness of Gnome DO 0.6 might end up in thousands or even tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) people’s desktops completely oblivious to your cautionary word.

:-\
David wrote,

Jonathan, I am fully aware of the “should haves.”
Brad Jensen wrote,

Disappointing news, but thank you for the answers.

Keep up the great work.
andrew wrote,

thanks for the info, just had gnome-do bring my laptop to a halt maxing out my CPU also a nasty mem leak earlier

all good though, looking forward to a update soon :)
iBuys wrote,

Thanks for the explanation. I’ve been hit with this bug, but its been more of an annoyance than anything else. I’ll take your advice and downgrade till this has been resolved.

Thanks for such a great tool for Linux, Gnome-Do was one of the reasons I switched over to Linux as my full time desktop at work a while ago.
conundrum wrote,

Just an update for everyone, one of Do’s lead devs (Jason “DBO” Smith) recently got the new laptop funded in large by the community’s donations, and is hard at work fixing some of these unforeseen issues.
Dani wrote,

Gnome-Do 0.6.1.0 seems to work perfect again!

Thank you Gnome Do developers!
Collin wrote,

I had huge cpu spikes from 0.6, but 0.6.1.0 seems to be doing great. Thanks for the update.
Steven wrote,

I would love to go back to 5.0.1 …. but where can I find it? I have searched the internet high and low to no avail… “do” is such an ambigious word when it comes to searching on google!