Re: PROPOSAL: GNOME Volume Manager for GNOME 2.8

[Ole Laursen <olau hardworking dk>]

Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com> writes:

[...]

> This is what we have to do to keep GNOME sane and top-down-designed. It
> seems to be somewhat out of sync with the results that are de facto
> created by our organizational structure and development mode, however. I
> think it'd be great if someone had some smart ideas on how to improve
> the situation.

Step 1: someone sit down and do the work, finishing your list.

Step 2: someone document (gasp!) how this was done to ensure that
later additions will integrate nicely.

Do I get any points? :-)

It worked with the HIG. The looks of everything has improved
dramatically ever since the HIG started telling us how to layout
dialogs.


About organisation: I had a course on software development philosophy
this semester which covered the idea of construction (think formal
software engineering top-down analysis & design) vs. the idea of
evolution (the thing we do). The course made me realise that our
organisational structure actually may be a strength, not a weakness.

>From what I learned, it would perhaps be unwise to try to move to far
towards (top-down) construction. Instead we just need to stop and
rethink some things from time to time as we go along. The control
center components are fundamentally healthy, they have just evolved so
much that they now need some more structure to support them.

If anyone is interested in these things, I can wholeheartedly
recommend our course book, "Computers in Context: The Philosophy and
Practice of Systems Design". It's a short and light read, and even
cheap. Here's a link to Amazon:

  http://makeashorterlink.com/?P50312388

-- 
Ole Laursen
http://www.cs.aau.dk/~olau/