freedesktop.org specification process

[PCMan]

On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 9:26 AM, Will Stephenson<wstephenson at kde.org> wrote:
>> Please have a look and comment.
>
> * Could do with a spell check and s/it's/its/ as appropriate.
>
> * "The GNOME and KDE communities have to take into account the needs and
> feedback of other communities as well"
>  This needs more work.

Thank you very much for mentioning this.

As a much smaller project/community (LXDE), we always feel that it's
not very easy to get involved in freedesktop.org. Although the mailing
list is theoratically open to everyone, things used by Gnome or KDE or
pushed by mainstream distro makers tends to get much more attention
due to there high publicity and large user base.

Most of the time, things developed by KDE and Gnome teams are quite
good both in quality and the design. But the problem is, the specs
designed by them might not be suitable for desktop environments other
than Gnome and KDE since we all have different goals and design
principles. That's why there are so many different desktop
environments.

Given the much more limited resources and development man power we
have, it's very difficult for us, other smaller desktop projects, to
spend as much effort as Gnome or KDE in this area. So it might seem
that we are not actively join the discussion, but that doesn't mean
that we don't have our opinions on the specs. Besides, once something
is widely used in either Gnome or KDE, for maximal compatibility, we
must follow them no matter it's a good design or not otherwise we'll
have compatibility issues with applications from Gnome or KDE
projects.

So this could make a false sense of wide acceptance. We support those
specs because we need to provide the users maximized compatibility,
not because we think the spec is good. Unfortunately, once something
is already widely used in KDE or Gnome, it's hard to fix since it's
already widely used and any change could break backward compatibility.

So, if the process of spec development is going to be changed, I hope
there could be more chance for smaller projects other than Gnome and
KDE to get involved. Otherwise xdg could easily develops some specs
which only work well for Gnome and KDE, and not for others. Then
things couldn't be really 'cross-desktop' because 'cross-desktop'
never equals 'supported by Gnome + KDE'.

Thank you all for reading this.