Re: NLD10 and GNOME

[Dan Winship <danw novell com>]

Alan Cox wrote:
> So if Fedora, Ubuntu and every other Gnome using distribution also start
> doing tons of private development

(Excluding Xgl, there was hardly "tons" of private development.)

> then trying to jam it all in CVS
> afterwards how do you expect Gnome to develop when all these variants
> suddenely try and get merged and all overlap and clash.

We don't. A lot of people have assumed that we're expecting to force the
new menu code into the GNOME mainline at some point, which I guess is a
reasonable assumption given what happened with Ximian Desktop, etc, but
that was never the plan here. At the moment we're not even planning to
ship it in SUSE 10.1 (which is 90% the same codebase as NLD10). The new
menu is something we did for NLD, and if the community wants it too,
then great, but we didn't do it with the expectation that they
necessarily would. It's like Industrial was.

> Nor does the committee argument stand up. It is perfectly possible to
> post in advance that "we are going to do this, we've created a temporary
> alternate repository for the work and if you want to join in or help
> merge stuff back as it meets acceptability please sign up"

Yes, I shouldn't have suggested that secrecy was a necessary part of the
mix. The secrecy doesn't necessarily help. But how does it actually
*hurt*? Yes, there are integration issues in some cases, but not in this
case. Yes, there are code review issues as you mentioned in another
message, but it's not like the GNOME community and/or Red Hat is
reviewing the work we do on YaST or iFolder or any of dozens of other
non-GNOME things, so that argument also feels weak. Novell has also been
doing tons of GNOME work in the open, so it's not like we're trying to
get a free ride off GNOME. So what exactly have we done wrong?

-- Dan