UPDATED: GNOME 1.4 Release Delayed, Expected Ready by Day's End

Note: Since this story first appeared, the GNOME release team made another release announcement stating that contrary to Ms. Proctor's assertion below, Medusa was, indeed, left out of this release. -mph

By Michael Hall, LinuxToday

Despite a false start caused by a bug in a portion of Nautilus, the GNOME 1.4 release scheduled for today will go forward as planned, according to a GNOME Foundation spokesperson.

Jacob Berkman, one of five GNOME release managers, said a problem with Medusa, a key part of Nautilus, was warranted serious enough to push the release back. Nautilus is the new file manager provided by Eazel and is considered a centerpiece of GNOME 1.4. Medusa is responsible for indexing the user's hard drive to speed locating files on a system. According to Berkman, the bug in Medusa caused it to leak file descriptors, integers that identify an open file within a process. Developers at Eazel were unwilling to comment further on the nature of the problem.

One option the project faced was removal of Medusa from the release in order to keep to the release timetable. After a few hours delay, release managers for the GNOME project decided to await a fix for the problem in question, described by GNOME Foundation spokesperson Leslie Proctor as a "minor snag." According to Proctor, the project will begin propagating shortly and should be ready for download later today.

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