Re: Fw: Incessant Horse Flogging.

[John Palmieri <johnp martianrock com>]

On Sat, 2002-11-16 at 00:28, George Farris wrote:
> On Fri, 2002-11-15 at 10:17, John Fleck wrote:
> > On Fri, Nov 15, 2002 at 08:48:20AM -0700, Bowie J. Poag wrote:
> > > 
> > > > Everything mimics something. It could be nature, a similar system, a
> > > > previous invention, etc.  The electronic desktop mimics the physical
> > > > desktop.
> > > 
> > > Yes, but occasionally there are leaps in the evolution of those
> > > systems..both in nature, and in manufacturing. Nature tries things out..
> > 
> > This metaphor starts you down a dangerous path, but I think the metaphor still
> > holds. In the vast majority of cases nature's experiments fail, leading to
> > death or extinction. Innovation is relatively easy. Successful innovation is
> > very hard.
> > 
> > 
> 
> I'm thinking that these things can and should be developed in parallel 
> as a fork (put on flame suit) to the current GNOME branch and released as
> "experimental" much like the "stable" and "unstable" branches.
> 
> This way people get the best of both worlds and those ideas that testers
> (yes there will be some) really like will stick.  In the mean time GNOME 
> can work to be a solid replacement for other desktops.
> 
> We do want a critical mass of GNOME users and new and experimental ideas
> may not initially achieve critical mass.
>  
This is sort how it is done already.  Someone says they have a cool new
idea so they A) create new libraries like GStreamer which prove to
useful and are integrated as a new dependancy or B) get a local copy of
the branch they wish to edit and start submitting patches in hopes that
the patch proves useful.  A whosale forking of the GNOME codebase is
mostly undesirable since you would spend too much time maintaining
updates (note that unstable would be just a fluid as experimental).  As
far as asking the maintainers to fork that is bad.  They have enough to
worry about as it is.  Realy, local copys are the best playground.

--
J5