Slackware is dropping Gnome

[Adam Myrow]

This may be disturbing news to Slackware users interested in Gnopernicus. 
Slackware-current has dropped Gnome entirely.  From what I can tell, the 
reasoning is that it is too unstable.  Here is the entry from the 
Slackware-current ChangeLog.  For those that don't know, Slackware-current 
is basically the alpha/beta test directory for the next release of 
Slackware Linux.

gnome/*:  Removed from -current, and turned over to community support and 
distribution.  I'm not going to rehash all the reasons behind this, but 
it's been under consideration for more than four years.  There are already 
good projects in place to provide Slackware GNOME for those who want it, 
and these are more complete than what Slackware has shipped in the past. 
So, if you're looking for GNOME for Slackware -current, I would recommend 
looking at these two projects for well-built packages that follow a policy 
of minimal interference with the base Slackware system:

     http://gsb.sf.net
     http://gware.sf.net

There is also Dropline, of course, which is quite popular.  However, due 
to their policy of adding PAM and replacing large system packages (like 
the entire X11 system) with their own versions, I can't give quite the 
same sort of nod to Dropline.  Nevertheless, it remains another choice, 
and it's _your_ system, so I will also mention their project:

     http://www.dropline.net/gnome/

Please do not incorrectly interpret any of this as a slight against GNOME 
itself, which (although it does usually need to be fixed and polished 
beyond the way it ships from upstream more so than, say, KDE or XFce) is a 
decent desktop choice.  So are a lot of others, but Slackware does not 
need to ship every choice.  GNOME is and always has been a moving target 
(even the "stable" releases usually aren't quite ready yet) that really 
does demand a team to keep up on all the changes (many of which are not 
always well documented).  I fully expect that this move will improve the 
quality of both Slackware itself, and the quality (and quantity) of the 
GNOME options available for it.

Folks, this is how open source is supposed to work.  Enjoy.  :-)