icon naming spec project on launchpad?

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Friday 26 June 2009, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Thu, 25.06.09 15:21, Rodney Dawes (dobey.pwns at gmail.com) wrote:
> > On Thu, 2009-06-25 at 20:32 +0200, Julien Danjou wrote:
> > Bugzilla and MoinMoin don't provide useful work-flow for maintaining
> > status and discussion of something like icon names. They are not
> > particularly great for task oriented work-flows, while LaunchPad Bugs
> > is designed more for a task based work-flow. And so there is a
> > discussion as to whether we should use LP for managing this information
> > for the Icon Naming Spec, or if people have better (or worse) ideas
> > about how to do it.
>
> The fact that the spec is very badly maintained is certainly not
> getting any better by moving it to Launchpad. Right the contrary, it's
> just another nail in the coffin to make it completely obsolete.

a couple of people have offered this POV now. this concerns me deeply, as KDE 
just recently adopted this spec. the only reason we went through all that 
work[1] was to gain the benefits of a shared spec. if the spec dies now, then 
our time and energy will have been wasted.

to me, this is not an acceptable outcome. and i can't imagine _anyone_ here 
thinking it is. so we probably all want the same thing, but there's something 
here blocking that from happening. classic group dynamic problem, right? :)

having watched the past interactions around the icon naming specification, i 
have some inklings as to what that "something" might be made up of. (and it's 
more than one thing or one person.) there's evidently some unhappiness and 
disagreement around this, and as such i'd suggest that a mailing list is a 
poor way to deal with this.

here's my proposal to move this forward and not lose the baby with the 
bathwater:

1) let's get the spec itself into the git repository; i'm happy to do this 
myself even. then we have some place we can work on the end result in a 
collaborative fashion, and build workflow around this particular spec from 
there. if the workflow moves to launchpad or stays on fd.o's bugtracker and 
mailing lists, at least we'll have a place we can work together on the 
deliverable.

2) let's arrange for an irc meeting to discuss this. i'd suggest #freedesktop 
on irc.freenode.net, and one of the days between now and GCDS starting. i'm in 
a UTC-6 timezone, but am very flexible right now timewise and will commit to 
attending. if the others can RSVP to this email with days and times that work 
for them, we can nail it down. i'm happy to also serve as moderator for the 
meeting[2] if that would be deemed helpful, though i'd just as happily attend 
as a participant if someone else steps up to facilitate.

alternatively, if enough of the stakeholders will be at GCDS next week, a 
meeting could be schedule with those people for a F2F. (i unfortunately won't 
be there, as i'm moving house ... bad timing, i know.)

as a third alternative, i could even set up a conference call for us, though i 
find those to be even trickier when dealing with F/OSS hackers. :)


one way or another, though, this obviously needs to be worked out, and if we 
communicate openly with each other we can certainly arrive at a workable 
solution that will benefit as many people as possible[3].

what do you say?


[1] some of which was my work, so i feel this one even more personally than i 
might usually ;)

[2] as a moderator, i won't be able to participate in the same fashion as the 
other attendees; IME a moderator must facilitate, and that means keeping both 
a neutral POV and paying more attention to the agenda and time schedule than 
getting deeply involved with the discussion.

[3] that may not be "everyone", but the goal should be "everyone, or as close 
as we can get to that"

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software

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