Re: Re: gnome-panel & gnome-applets?

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 2:47 PM, Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> wrote:

by the way, this whole thread is pretty angry and confrontational - or,
at least, it feels a lot that way.

It has.  I think though as a project we're not quite managing this as well as we could.  Not enough context for the changes we are making and we've always been kind of poor in communicating these things.  When there is a lack of real information in the overall structure of what  Gnome 3.0 means.  So we have these discussions about applets going away in a vacuum without really explaining the underlying reasons why we are doing so.  When we don't get the reasons then we get into these rat holes.

I have the perception that information on what all is going on is getting lost in the noise.  What is the canonical point where information on this stuff need to flow to?  Seems to me you need to pick someone or maybe two to handle all the details, parse, and then communicate.

the 3.x UX is not complete, and will probably take some development
cycles to iterate over the various ideas that are being experimented; I

Yep, that's what I alluded to in a previous message.   Like some parts of Gnome 2.0 it took a while for things to stabilize.  I expect the same.  There is really nothing wrong saying stay on Gnome 2.0 till we reach a point of stability.

this whole thread, like the *many* others that preceded it, has been
fairly aggressive in the pushback of the new design - it doesn't
implement that pet feature, it requires hardware capabilities that not
every one is willing to commit to, etc. - and while on one side my
initial reaction was to say: "well, tough - here's a nickel kid, go buy
yourself a better computer; and if you want to keep using gnome2 feel
free to maintain the pieces you require; and if you don't want to, then
there's the door: don't let the it kick you in the ass too hard on your
way out"; but that was just my initial reaction, and I'm *really* trying
(and willing) to tune that down. might be that the old age is finally
catching up on me.

You old hacker you. :-)  What you really need is a group of people between developers and community to explain this stuff, filter out the noise etc etc.
 

I understand the pushback to changes. I understand that something that
was designed from the ground up is still missing some feature. I
understand that that design calls for some drastic changes in how the
user experience should be shaped, which means that some features will
not be implemented. these are choices made by people that generally know
what they are doing, and that have been trusted for years by the whole
community of people that show up in GNOME. I'm pretty sure they haven't
been replaced by pod people. I guess the same measure of trust should be
still applied, even if we don't immediately see the endgame.

I think people just want to know what the final thing is going to look like.  People are always scared that some pet features of there is going to disappear.  We have this reputation of removing stuff and people get attached to the features tehy have.  I am no exception to this.  But what I've realized is that if you want those features, then you open up a bugzilla, and volunteer to help.  So if you want system monitor again, you need to help get _javascript_ bindings to gtop of bug people to do that and then ask "what can I do?"  Resources are not infinite and people need to understand that if they want a particular feature at the initial release they need to jump in and help and not complain.  If are not doing that, then what is missing that we be enabled to do this.

sri