Re: taking features away (compact view removed from Nautilus)

[Adam Dingle <adam yorba org>]

On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 1:38 AM, Allan Day <allanpday gmail com> wrote:

Adam Dingle <adam yorba org> wrote:
> I realized recently to my surprise and dismay that the compact view has been
> removed from Nautilus:

Adam, if you wanted to discuss this change, you could have done so on
the bug or on the Nautilus mailing list, or by asking on
#gnome-design. I would have been happy to have given you some
background on why the decision was made.

Jon has been doing some fantastic work on Nautilus recently. It was
getting very little - if any - developer attention and he has stepped
up to make dramatic improvements, including addressing long-standing
complaints. I'm really excited about the next release of Nautilus
thanks to his work; instead of having no movement whatsoever, we are
going to have lots of great improvements to talk about.

There has been a bunch of discussion around these changes. Not the
mailing list approach that you seem to want, but the existing Nautilus
maintainers have been involved and a range of design people have been
consulted. I personally agreed with removing compact view - I think
it's a good change.

...

> I'd like to end on a constructive note.  I propose that GNOME adopt the
> following policy.  No major feature will be removed from a core GNOME
> application before a discussion has occurred on a public mailing list such
> as this one (or on a Bugzilla bug, with a prominent mailing list
> announcement pointing to the bug in question).  I also propose that all such
> feature removals that have occurred in the 3.6 development cycle be reverted
> until such discussion has occured .

I strongly disagree with that suggestion. I don't think it would be
workable, and I don't think it would make GNOME a better place to
work. There is still time to discuss changes that have been made; we
don't need to wrap ourselves up in policies.

Allan,

thanks for your level-headed response.  In retrospect, I think the tone of my original post was too dramatic.  I got upset when I saw a longstanding favorite feature disappear and I made some sweeping suggestions that may have gone too far.  I apologize for the dramatic tone and will avoid it in the future.

I remain seriously concerned that removing Nautilus's compact view was a mistake, but as you have and others have pointed out this is not really the right place to discuss that.  I'll begin a discussion on the Nautilus mailing list and will look forward to discussing this more there.

More broadly, I also remain concerned that large changes are being made to core GNOME apps by a small set of people (basically the design team plus the maintainers of those apps) without enough input or feedback from users of those apps.  You're probably right that a sweeping policy change is not the way to address this.  But I do think it's a problem that needs to be addressed.

adam