Proposing the StatusNotifier specification

[Ted Gould]

On Tue, 2010-01-12 at 10:13 -0800, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On January 12, 2010, Aurélien Gâteau wrote:
> > I remember one of the outcomes of the freedesktop.org discussion we had
> > at Gran Canaria Desktop Summit was that a spec didn't have to be fully
> > finalized to be allowed to use the org.freedesktop DBus namespace.
> 
> personally, i think it needs to have at least significant "sign on" by xdg 
> projects. these kinds of conversations that are tentative, unsure and spiral 
> towards inconclusive results are precisely why i have advocated the use of a 
> metadata file in the repository.

I agree with you 100% (may be even 110%) on the need for a file, and a
process for how that file gets signed.  I don't think that we have
enough process for that today.  I think that we need one, which
basically amounts to bylaws of FD.o on specs.

I think there are some unanswered questions:

      * Who can sign it?  I think there should be some way for projects
        to designate who from their projects are the go-to people when
        looking for such signatures.  In general, you could say the
        boards, but that's unlikely to be the right folks.  I'm guessing
        technical standards aren't their expertise.

      * What votes are needed?  Is an XFCE vote equivalent to a KDE
        vote?  Do people classically categorized as "desktop
        customizers" (Maemo, Moblin, etc.) get their own votes or are
        they lumped in with GNOME in this case?

I think that FD.o was started as a place for discussion, and we're
finding that we need a little bit more than just a place for discussion.
Different people seem to apply different weights to discussions here and
the specs -- and we should be clearer about what they mean (both the
discussions and the specs).

More on topic, I'm worried about having to ship code that implements
StatusNotifier under "org.kde" and "org.ayatana" real-soon-now.  And
since we don't have answers to these questions, or a process, I'd hate
to see this spec held back by something that doesn't exist.

		--Ted

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