Flame wars R us (was Re: RSG, draft 4 -- Move it to ...)

[Bruce Stephens <bruce cenderis demon co uk>]

Bowie Poag <bjp@primenet.com> writes:

> Tom:
> 
> A) Glad to see you've adopted the UISG's Compliance Level layout. One more
>    checkmark on the list.
> 
> B) Please move discussion of your project to the separate mailing list
>    that was offered to you; And feel free to advertise on this list for
>    users to subscribe to it. That way, we both have focus for the two
>    projects. 

Why are there two projects, rather than a disagreement within one?
Who died and made Bowie king?

What's this "conformance" stuff *for*, anyway?  

Users aren't going to choose applications on the basis of notional
Gnome conformance (I suspect): they'll choose whichever applications
work best.  That might be an application which fits in neatly with
Gnome, but it might be one which is simply lots better than anything
similar.  People are going to use the Gimp regardless of conformance
or lack of conformance.  And people constructing distributions are
going to act similarly.

Another goal of conformance might be to help application writers.  But
this could be informal: a list of technical things (how to do
drag&drop, how to interoperate with the panel, how to use the help
system), together with a bunch of guidelines (including Bowie's and
Tom's), with programmers choosing whatever they feel works best.

Ideally, of course, there'd be some ideas with experimental support:
the collection of guidelines might have references to experimental
results, showing that following the guideline is (at least in some
circumstances), objectively better.

But let's be honest, the first versions of these guidelines aren't
actually going to mean very much.  They're going to be revised, lots
of applications won't conform, and that really doesn't matter.  A bit
of non-uniformity should help clarify what works and what doesn't: in
half a year or a year's time, it'll be clearer what applications ought
to do.