Re: IRC channels in gnome development

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

"Murray Cumming" <murrayc murrayc com> wrote:

> On Sun, 2011-02-06 at 14:27 +0000, Allan Day wrote:
> > It simply isn't true to say that we haven't made an effort to
> > explain what we're doing. I explained many of the design
> > considerations in my blog post [1] on this subject, and I did that
> > precisely because I wanted to help people to be informed.
> [snip]
> > [1]
> > http://afaikblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/on-laptop-lids-and-power-settings/
> 
> Regardless of the merits of the specific issue, and while I'm thankful
> that you are trying: That is an awful attempt at explaining anything.
> You waffle at great length about the issue, basically just saying that
> it's better because it's better, and then your actually say that you
> "won’t for sake of brevity".
> 
> Sorry, but I can't find a nice way to say that your write poorly.
> Filling a page with text is not the same as providing information.
> Hand-waving and waffling is not ultimately convincing. I recommend
> Strunk and White.

Murray,

It seems to me incredibly unproductive when someone shows up who is actually interested in writing about the GNOME design process to flame them for writing badly (which I find entirely unsubstantiated reading through Alan's post.) The fact we have any good information about the GNOME 3 design targeted at the "general public" is basically due to Alan - e.g., the currently state of https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/ is largely his work.

If you have questions that weren't answered, of course, ask them! If you have concrete suggestions for additional information that should have been provided, I'm sure that Alan would love to have them. But your message above combines rudeness to an enthusiastic new contributor to GNOME with the same lack of actual content that you accuse Alan of.

- Owen