Re: Design by Community

[Kjartan Maraas <kmaraas broadpark no>]

ons, 08,.02.2006 kl. 23.20 +1100, skrev Jeff Waugh:
> <quote who="Alan Cox">
> 
> > It isn't about "Design by community" but "Design IN the community".
> 
> *Exactly* - and it's so easy to fall to laziness in the face of all the
> challenges Dan so eloquently explained in his email... and that's what has
> been happening in GNOME for a long time now. Let's break the cycle!
> 
> While the Linux process has its warts, there are two things it is great at
> that we should mention here: First, a fairly easy to understand technical
> and social leadership - decisions get made. Second, a pretty uncompromising
> approach to design in the community - it's really hard to drop a pre-cooked
> hairball (cat hair *or* angel hair) into the kernel process without getting
> roasted, spanked and harshly reviewed.
> 
I think the main difference here is that most of the design/review/audit
process for the linux-kernel happens on the mailing list[s] and we tell
people to go argue about it in bugzilla. The reason we point people to
other lists/bugzilla is exactly that we have the problem of too few
eyes/minds and too many mouths on desktop-devel-list for example. We're
not going to get around that by creating yet another mailing list every
time we get annoyed by some thread that propelled into a useless
semantic discussion or whatever.

I think we'd be served well by making desktop-devel-list be *the* place
for discussion about development and design issues and use other tools
like bugzilla etc to complement this where that makes sense.

If we compare ourselves to the linux-kernel we're seeing ridiculously
small amounts of mail to our list compared with them.

Use your power to delete a thread or a message if something is of no
interest to you.

Cheers
Kjartan