Summary of the fdo disussion at GCDS

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On 2009/07/10 03:29, Daniel Stone wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 01:13:59AM +0200, Jannis Pohlmann wrote:
>> Hopefully, the degree of participation in fd.o discussions will
>> increase (I think it already has improved a lot over the past weeks),
>> but I fear that with only two projects having the final word on
>> everything, we might eventually end up in lethargy with a lot of
>> specifications pending approval because nobody cares about making a
>> decision.
>
> So you can offer a complete, ironclad, 100% guarantee that Xfce's
> delegate will always remain completely responsive at all times? What
> about Enlightenment? Everyone else? Surely that would only make the
> problem _worse_, not better.

No, I can't say our delegate will always be 100% responsive all the 
time.  (I doubt you could say that about GNOME's or KDE's either, but 
that's besides the point.)

But dealing with that and making allowances for people's schedules is 
what community is all about.  To borrow a criticism from someone else, 
with this attitude you might as well just call it gnome-kde.org.  And if 
that's what GNOME/KDE want to do -- just make sure those two desktops 
are on similar pages and can interoperate well, without caring about the 
smaller players -- that's fine.  I'd certainly be disappointed, but 
that's certainly their option, and it would be somewhat understandable 
if that's the route they want to take.  But if that's the case, let's 
get that clear up front and stop pretending fd.o is going to serve the 
interests of anyone but GNOME and KDE.

But I think all this is part of what Aaron (at least) wanted to avoid: 
having to rely on bottlenecks to get things done.  And I agree with 
that.  All the specs should have a machine-parseable section about who 
has adopted them and in what capacity, and most of it should be 
automatic.  If someone implements a spec for GNOME, they mark down that 
they have, and who they are.  They don't need to be a "delegate" or 
something silly like that.  See some of Aaron's replies in this thread 
for a better explanation of how that could work.

	-brian