Re: Awesome new Mozilla roadmap!

[Kjartan Maraas <kmaraas online no>]

s?, 06.04.2003 kl. 22.43 skrev Ali Akcaagac:
> On Sunday 06 April 2003 22:03, Kjartan Maraas wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> > This looks to me to be a "discussion" where two people agree that something
> > is wrong with the direction GNOME 2.x is going in. Namely you and the Galeon
> > maintainer.
> 
> Yes but there are even MORE people who think the same. I don't want to value 
> how many but I'm sure that there are a lot of people (my previous 70% still 
> counts) because I think that there are a lot of people here that don't like 
> special things within GNOME.
> 
Yeah, there are some who like it and some who don't. What's the big fuzz
about? Where did you get your 70% from?

> GConf, Button-Order, Nautilus views (I got an email from someone about this), 
> general usability, flexibility and so on.
>
> You should seriously solve these issues. You must solve them if you want the 
> programmers come back to GNOME and work on it. I know that a huge amount of 
> your previous supporters left because of this and new ones to come will take 
> a lot of time specially they need to be trained and educated in the core of 
> GNOME first. You can continue and ignore this fact if you like.
> 
We probably lost a few and by the looks of it gained a whole lot of
others.

> > The goal of the GNOME project is to create a usable desktop where you
> > actually get to spend time doing real work, not flick a thousand switches
> > just for the fun of it.
> 
> Right now it's everything else than usable. Usable is what I find on KDE but 
> not on GNOME. GNOME right now is a poor mess where you deal more with stupid 
> configuration, toothbiting with GConf and getting things halfway working the 
> way you like after you spent 7 days on it. And you need a lot of other 3rd 
> party applications to immitate a halfway working Desktop. But this alone is 
> not the point. You are heavily announcing GNOME as THE open source Desktop on 
> all sorts of places and you know it's not as mature as for example KDE or you 
> know it lacks a lot of code, cleanup, polish AND TOOLS. Tools that make 
> people exciting to use GNOME you are not helping the Open Source Desktop that 
> way imo. If you look around at the tools then you see that everything is 
> half, not finished, not maintained or simply not existing. Seriously do you 
> expect business will get excited about GNOME ?
> 
Why can't you just post small concise messages with issues you think
needs solving including an argument explaining why it's broken and what
you suggest to improve it instead of making broad generalized
allegations that only end up like this thread?

> > > http://gnomesupport.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=7703#7703
> 
> I was more refering to the Link of Herzi. Your browser should autojump to the 
> ancestor of that Webpage.
> 
Yeah, it did, but I tried reading up on the previous posts in the forum
to get some background. Guess what...the majority of people posting
comments were agreeing with the direction of GNOME's development.

> > Everyone has the right to an opinion, but it's the people who make the code
> > who get to decide how things play out in the end. This is how it has always
> > been in a free software project, and I think that is one of it's biggest
> > strengths.
> 
> And that's what makes it totally weak again. People who can't teamwork decide 
> what's going inside GNOME. Listen! people who are good coders aren't 
> necessarily diplomatic people or people who know what a user wants or not,

I think this is just ridicoulus. The sense of being part of a team is
one of the main reasons I've stayed involved in this project since early
1998 and I've never felt that this has become less true. Even the
"scary" commercial players that are involved are playing their part as
parts of the team. Please take the fud about commercial interests
destroying the GNOME project elsewhere. The commercial interest in GNOME
is one of many positive things the project has going for it IMO.

Software developers have been ignoring a lot of issues wrt the users for
decades and look where that got us. Coders need to be able to make
usable user interfaces as well as make usable "programmer" interfaces,
both are equally important. Without good API's you don't get
programmers, without a usable user interface you don't get users. To
survive you need both.
>  
> they are probably quoting text from stupid theoretical books they read and 
> claim it to be the right decision. And there is the biggest issue hacking 
> away from the real needs of a user that's what happens with GNOME right now. 
> Hey, this was brought up many times and not the first time after all.
> 
And it's always brought up in this fashion. Broad, sweeping, generalized
flamefests that get us nowhere.
 
> > No problem with that, but don't expect to get it your way just because you
> > are of a different opinion. The biggest problem is that people end up making
> > a lot of noise about small things and because of that nobody listens to the
> > few really important parts of critique. IMO of course.
> 
> Yeah and here we are about the split community again. GNOME needs developers 
> and people working on it right ? I think that we all agree here. And how do 
> you think this should happen if the community is heavily split right now ? 

You seem to think that the community is heavily split. The rest of the
project seems to think otherwise...

> Throw an eye on the modules on cvs.gnome.org half of the modules related to 
> GNOME 2 are unmaintained and left untouched for farious months now. Bugzilla 
> is getting filled with reports and patches that still stay there until they 
> grow roots. Maybe some of these issues getting fixed till 2.3.x or afterwards 
> but I'm highly sceptical if I take the overall stagnation of GNOME 

We have stable branches for a reason. They should not get new features
ever. Well, at least not in the normal case. Of course we can't solve
every problem in GNOME during one development cycle. It's making
step-by-step improvements that gets us anywhere in the first place.
We've tried feature-based release cycles before and they tend to drag
out forever before we get something out the door only to be left as
"uninteresting" right after the release because we've spent the last 6-8
months trying to stabilize things and the developers go mad from not
getting their newest features out.

> development into concern. KDE is flying away it has reached other dimensions 
> as serious taken Desktop Environment already and you still sit here and sleep 
> and discuss what technical stuff to inherit next.
> 
Nobody's sleeping here. And I don't think this is a very positive
attitude to present to people who are supposed to be improving *your*
desktop of choice for *you*.

> > > To leave heat out of this Mailinglist you can easily private email me and
> > > we continue the conversation there.
> >
> > No need for that as long as we can be civilized and keep focused on the
> > task at hand - improving the GNOME desktop.
> 
> Thank you, I'll appreciate it and thank you for your fair comment to me.
> 
> Maybe there is the one or other bold person who don't like certain things in 
> GNOME and like to comment on it. Maybe someone is going to fork the entire 
> GNOME project and make it suck less as it is right now. Going to the REAL 
> right direction is an idea worth discussing.

You still seem to think that you're the only one who's got a clue on
what the REAL right direction is, so why not share it with us in a
slightly less insulting tone?

--
Cheers
Kjartan