Re: Module Proposal: Zeitgeist

[Florian Max <florian muellner gmail com>]

On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 4:27 PM, Emily Gonyer <emilyyrose gmail com> wrote:

Then the design team ought to be more open about what exactly 'their' vision for gnome is, as well as open to other ideas/concepts. Insisting on doing things their way, while being extremely vague as to what exactly their way *is* is not helpful to the rest of the community who is trying to get stuff done.

First: the design team is very much trying to get stuff done, just like the "rest of the community". In fact, the design team is incredibly small (ergo: overworked). We have an extremely ambitious goal of creating an operating system, with just a handful of people doing design work towards that goal - compare that to the resources the likes of Apple or Microsoft put into their products to get an idea of the workload our folks have. I certainly have seen maintainers asking for design help on #gnome-design being turned down because no designer had any time to spend on yet-another-module.

Which brings us to the matter of openness: the results of everything the design team does ends up on the GNOME wiki under live.gnome.org/Design. Of course it would be really fancy if the wiki also contained the reasoning behind decisions, but let's face it - none of us does anything like that (I doubt you are adding comments like "Using a full-blown GObject rather than a boxed type here because ..." or "This variable is a double and not an integer because ..." to your code - I certainly don't. Still, wouldn't that be helpful for newcomers?). So what about the overall vision then? I don't disagree with you at all in that it is often pretty vague - not because the design team is being secretive about it, but because it is work-in-progress that we(*) are developing together as a community.

Also, it is worth pointing out that the power of the design team is very much limited to convincing developers and maintainers of their work - if a design is not implemented, it "pixel-rots" on the wiki, if a maintainer does not like a patch, it doesn't get committed.
 

IMHO the entire community is rather insulated from itself and rather hard to break into w/o serious help from someone already on the 'inside' as it were. If you haven't been around for years, no-one seems to particularly care what you have to say. Even finding these sorts of discussions isn't exactly easy, let alone making your voice heard.

From my own personal experience, I'd say that from the outside it looks a lot harder than it actually is, but that doesn't mean that there is no problem. Still, it is something that applies for the community at large, not just the design team - if someone presents a radical new vision for GTK+, it is very much relevant whether "someone" is Benjamin Otte or Emmanuele Bassi, or someone no one has ever heard of ...

Regards,
Florian

(*) to clarify, that "we" includes developers - I don't identify myself as a member of the design team, but as GNOME hacker who gets along fine with them :)