Re: Flames on d-d-l (was: Re: GNOME Namespace Management - ARC & GNOME)

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Fri, 2004-12-17 at 19:40 +0900, Ryan McDougall wrote:
> Recently I've come to the conclusion that some debates here could use a
> little more civil, less personal, tone. 99.9% of the traffic here is
> pleasant to read, but occasionally there are mails that might be
> considered "flamey".
> 
> Therefore I think its good for the health of this list to turn down the
> heat a notch, and realize that at the end of the day these battles don't
> mean all that much.
> 
> I think we can self police our flame-throwers here, but if not, it would
> suck if someone had to be Flame Sheriff and constantly bug us to be nice
> to each other. Maybe then we could get some of those lost core
> developers to rejoin the list so we don't disconnect from them.

I think they mostly left due to the low signal-to-noise ratio here.
There is such a huge amount of mails here, and very little of it matters
to them. On the whole I don't think the occasional flame we get matter
that much.

The problem is that not enough mails are interesting enough to dedicate
the hours of time needed for reading desktop-devel-list. So, in order to
get actual work done people are unsubscribing. Some of these are core
maintainers. This is pretty bad, since it means the core maintainers
don't have a place where they can reach each other. 

Its a hard problem. We want to encourage everyone, including non-
developers to give feedback. But, as the project grows we get more and
more developers and users, and it gets more and more time consuming to
read the feedback, and more likely that important information gets lost.
Stopping to take feedback is not an option, but stopping important
discussions is not and option either.

I don't know what can be done about this. Its clearly a scaling problem,
and sooner or later as we grow the project, things are gonna break down.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a notorious guerilla werewolf looking for 'the Big One.' She's a foxy 
junkie college professor trying to make a difference in a man's world. They 
fight crime!