Voting mechnism is needed for xdg discussion.

[Rodney Dawes]

Popularity contests are not the way to solve design issues. Also, we
already have a forum for "voting" on these issues. It's called mailing
list discussion. Having a straight yes/no vote on the issues doesn't
dissect the issues that may in fact cause other issues, which is why
they aren't getting consensus, or are dropped.

On Fri, 2009-06-05 at 21:02 +0800, PCMan wrote:
> Hi all,
> I'm lead developer of LXDE, a lightweight desktop environment
> following xdg standards.
> As everyone on  this mailing list knows, current desktop environments
> have many long-standing issues
> without consensus. All too often someone might have some proposals on
> the mailing list, and gets
> replies from several people, and then, the discussion just disappears.
> The issues are still there.
> Otherwise, there might be someone says "If there is no objection, I'll
> add XXXX to the spec."
> Later, maybe nobody noticed that issue, and the spec was changed silently.
> Besides, if the original author of that spec doesn't agree the change,
> no matter how many people want it, the spec won't be changed.
> This is not a really good way to achieve the goal of xdg.
> A more democratic and efficient way is hence needed.
> 
> I propose setting up a voting mechanism for some unresolved issues.
> A forum hosted on freedesktop.org or some other places is acceptable.
> 
> For unresolved but critical issues, like naming of some icons in the
> icon theme spec,
> we can wait a period of time (maybe one week) and let the users
> nominate possible options.
> Then, a vote can be held, and the users on this mailing list can vote
> on those issues.
> 
> If the people joining the vote is too few, the result can be invalid.
> Otherwise some unresolved issues can be settled.
> 
> Please consider this. Voting can definitely improve the efficiency of
> decision making.
> Besides, the result of the vote can be acceptable by most of the developers.
> We can know what most developers really want. Since the specs were formed in
> a democratic way, most implementers will happily follow them and the
> controversies can be minimized.
> 
> If nobody is going to do this, we're willing to set up a forum for it.