Re: Rules for design in Gnome

[Brian Cameron <brian cameron oracle com>]

Tomeu:

On 04/26/12 02:06 AM, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 15:10, Alberto Ruiz<aruiz gnome org>  wrote:
> I'm afraid that interfering in the maintainer's responsibilities is a
> very big can of worms, more likely to do harm than good. There's
> something powerful in how a maintainer feels responsible about his
> module and the community that surrounds it.

Some of my thoughts about the GNOME maintainer community, aside from
the fact that they do a great job.

1) There really are not any good forums for communicating with
   core GNOME maintainers as a group.  Looking at MaintainersCorner
   I see that GNOME only requires maintainers to subscribe to
   devel-announce-list.  I suppose much communication happens on
   desktop-devel-list and foundation-list, but it seems hard to
   figure out how to have a dialog with the maintainers as a
   group or how to make decisions.  A lot of problems might solve
   themselves if we made it easier for maintainers to focus on
   decision making when needed.

2) Many distros are currently supporting GNOME 2 based distros.  While
   I think it is good that our development community is focused on
   GNOME 3, it is also important to encourage distros to cooperate as
   they maintain GNOME 2 and keep it working well so that the brand
   is strong and positive.

   I remember Vincent suggesting that core GNOME 2 modules might need
   additional maintainers in order to provide ongoing support to
   do cooperative efforts like this.

   To make something like this work well requires coordination
   and decision making amongst maintainers.  Providing more support
   for more branches might require more infrastructure.  It seems it
   should be possible to strike a better balance between focusing
   energy on new development while providing more impressive support
   for those who continue to depend on GNOME 2.

I'd say there is probably enough topics to warrant having a Maintainers
BOF or something at GUADEC where topics like this might be discussed.  I
think it would be great if we could find new ways to augment our
maintainer community, or to make our decision-making processes easier
and more transparent.  And probably a good forum to discuss what sorts
of Usability rules resonate most with maintainers.

Brian