Back to article  gnotebook: Bugs, Press Releases, and Molasses:
The GNOME 1.4 Launch Considered  The Medusa Issue  April 6, 2001
GNOME 1.4 lurched into release first on Monday with an
announcement from the GNOME Foundation, then again on Tuesday,
when the release team sent out a mail declaring 1.4 well and
truly released and ready.  It was a puzzling release to figure
out, in part thanks to a last minute bug in Medusa, a package
that plays an integral part of Nautilus by providing an file
system indexing feature. The development team had discovered
leaking file descriptors that eventually hobbled the performance
of the indexing daemon, which might have answered a few
questions that had popped up on the Nautilus list regarding
serious speed hits even well-configured and relatively powerful
machines were suffering when the package swung into action via
its cron jobs.  Armchair software analysts were in action almost
immediately, as is their wont, demanding to know what the point
of Medusa was in the first plac