Summary of the fdo disussion at GCDS

[David Faure]

On Thursday 09 July 2009, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
>  in fact, as you note, what they will likely do is simply ask Tom 
> who knows a lot about Foo what he thinks and then just pass on his result. so 
> why not just let Tom do this directly?

So that a given project has a single voice, to avoid the situation where
several people from a given project have contradictory opinions and then
we have no idea if the project overall accepts the proposed
{ spec / shared lib / dbus interface } or not.

Let's say a spec is proposed here, and you say "KDE accepts it"
and a random noisy KDE guy says "this is crap, KDE refuses it",
and then to everyone else it becomes unclear whether KDE accepts 
or refuses the spec. We need an "official position" per project. Of course
we should come up with that position the usual way (technical discussion,
consenssus, "those who do the work" have more weight than "those who
just chat", etc.). But the difference between you and a random annoying
guy slightly related to KDE is something only _we_ know, the casual
reader of XDG list doesn't know who to believe. Hence the idea of a
single representative per project, who will of course delegate internally
to the right people if needed, or who will know anyway, whether KDE has
already accepted a technology because it's using it already ;)
(That's the point, actually - the "blessing" is supposed to happen after
the implementation is done :-), except for things like agreeing on a dbus
namespace, or if we don't have time to implement yet but plan to do so).

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Qt Software @ Nokia to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).