A question about procedure regarding a desktop environment policy

[Gregory Merchan <merchan phys lsu edu>]

What follows is a question about procedure. It is not an
invitation to make death threats, request tutelage regarding
window management, exhibit ignorance, ignore parts of a
message, explain something to me that I already know,
overestimate the magnitude or importance of part of the
user base, exaggerate the significance of a change in such
a way that offends people who lost loved ones to a bloody
revolution, request features that cannot be implemented
without control of the hardware platform, flame, bitch,
moan, or otherwise be stupid.

This is a question about why GNOME continues to support a
bad policy. The question is not whether the policy is bad.
Those who know the details know the policy is bad, and the
rest don't matter until they learn the details. (To learn,
study both X11 window management and interaction design.
This is not an invitation to request tutelage.)

This is a question with a finite number of simple answers
that fit forms such as:

  "I've been busy with other code, conferences, relocating,
   and getting my home Internet connection installed, so
   I haven't had the time to change that code."

  "My workplace superiors have told me that our continued
   use of GNOME and support of GNOME development is
   contingent upon this policy remaining. So many so much
   important parts of GNOME depend so much on us, that
   GNOME would die without us."


The policy is that GNOME supports most of the focus modes
that exist on X11. It does this by providing code that
implements various focus modes, by providing a GUI to
change the focus mode, and by avoiding things that do not
work for all focus modes.

Changing this policy does not require removing the code
for implementing the other focus modes. It does require
dropping the GUI to change the mode - unsupported states
should not be so easy to reach. Most importantly, it frees
developers to write better GNOME-compliant applications
without kluges in the code or the GUI to handle bad focus
modes.

In the near term, changing the policy means simply removing
the GUI to change focus mode (excluding gconf-editor which,
though a GUI, is not a GUI for normal users), and updating
the documentation (HIG included) to reflect the change.

Over time, this means improving those interfaces that have
been crippled by supporting multiple focus modes and
dismissing bugs caused by unsupported focus modes.

Only in the infinite future does this mean not at all
providing the unsupported modes - that change can happen
now, or when the policy changes, or lifetimes later.

So, again, the question:

  What is preventing GNOME form dropping sloppy focus support?


Cheers,
Greg


P.S. - Since I wrote that, there have been more off-topic
       responses. This is not an opinion poll. This is
       not a topic for the usability list. This is a fairly
       straightfoward matter of finding out what it takes
       to be rid of a bad policy.