Re: 2.4 Proposed Modules - 2 weeks left

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Wed, May 07, 2003 at 12:09:31PM +0100, Bill Haneman wrote: 
> All this stuff about "move forward or die" is just scaremongering IMO. 
> The advantage about raising the bar for inclusion in GNOME (rather than
> taking the "something is better than nothing" position) is that the
> overall integration and consistency of the "GNOME Desktop" will be
> better.  That's the _good_ part of the well-integrated/featureful
> tradeoff; so there is something to be gained by waiting.

This is wrong as an empirical/historical matter in my view.  Software
has historically been improved by virtue of its inclusion.

If inclusion is the incentive, then we'd expect everything to stop
improving once it was added.

Inclusion is a way of handing out responsibility *and* authority for a
particular functionality area to a new maintainer. Relying on someone
like that often motivates them. It delegates a bit of GNOME to someone
new, and that's pretty important for growing the project.

The position btw is not "something is better than nothing"
categorically, but "something that is the right thing (i.e. a base we
want to build on), and that is already significantly useful to users,
is better than nothing"

Havoc