Be respectful and considerate. A complaint.

[Holger Berndt <hb gnome org>]

I was baffled to see the extra pane feature from Nautilus
silently removed.

The story of this feature has a lot to do with communication and
respect, and sadly enough, this mail is an addendum to other recent
and not-so-recent topics on this list - so it fits better here than on
Nautilus' ML.

I always wanted a split-view mode in Nautilus, so some time ago I did
a design and proposed a patch on the nautilus mailing list. Various
aspects were discussed, ranging from "Why is this useful?" to
implementation details. After a few discussion / redesign loop iterations
during the following 10 months it was finally merged and anounced in
GNOME's 2.30 release notes. Many reviews of that release mentioned that
feature prominently and favorably, and I got lots of positive user
feedback.

What also came along was my first encounter with the design team - and
it was not a pleasant one. Interestingly, it only took place _after_ all
discussions and after the merge.

Appearantly, they had a UX hackfest. That they didn't follow the
discussion was pretty obvious (as certain false claims that they
repeated were in fact discussed), but that didn't stop them to post
their "results" on Planet GNOME-aggregated blogs.

I wouldn't treat contributors that I don't know personally like that -
but hey, I guess name-calling their work as "total crack rock" is just how
the internet works.

However, if people spread accusations like "messy code - extra pain" on
a widely visible forum like planet GNOME [1] and don't answer my
repeated questions what's messy about it then that's not a discussion
anymore. It's also not criticism. It's outright slander.

But hey, I wasn't bitter. I thought "Talk is cheap, show me the code".

But now that the design team managed to remove this feature after all,
silently, without a remotely comparable public discussion like it
underwent before going in, I wonder if that's the way the GNOME community
really wants to work and treat one another.

Holger

[1] http://www.flickr.com/photos/mairin/4382707014/in/set-72157623492365266/