Re: Viewports and gnome 2

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Ben Ford <ben kalifornia com> writes:
> This is exactly the arrogance that many have complained about.  Just
> because somebody thinks differently than you does not make them
> wrong.

The GNOME developers (including coders, UI people, docs, QA, everyone)
are responsible for making good decisions about the software, that
benefit the maximum number of users. There are always tradeoffs,
and doing everything anyone wants is plainly not a good decision.
So decisions are made which may not make everyone happy, but in the
best judgment of the developers are the best decisions.

I think all developers are happy to get new information or insights
and reevaluate decisions in light of that. But developers are not
interested in flames every time a decision is made, especially flames
that don't consider users as a whole, or that don't address the
reasons why the decision was made, or that demand a resolution NOW
instead of when someone has time to sort out the issue.

I'll also toss a little clue out there: if the content of a flame is
"you arrogant bastards made a decision I don't like, reverse the
decision you think was right for most users in order to satisfy this
one loud, persistent user or I'll quit using GNOME" we are very likely
to say "please go ask another desktop to make wrong decisions, we are
not interested."

Or at least we should say that, though many free software maintainers
end up giving in to the loudest people out of sheer exhaustion.  I
don't intend to do so personally, since I've had four or five years of
practice building up a thick skin. But I try to take the flames as a
symptom of some real concern, and take the genuine issues buried in
the flame into consideration.

But our UI and code quality _cannot_ be driven by whoever shouts the
loudest or the most unpleasantly, I'm sorry. It's just not going to be
that way.  The people that spend the most time thinking about issues
and going through bugzilla and otherwise doing the work are going to
do their best to get things right. Anything less would be shameful.

Havoc