Re: [ Revised Proposal ] Continuous Builds in GNOME

[Tristan Van Berkom <tristan vanberkom codethink co uk>]

On Sat, 2016-06-18 at 08:15 +0100, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
[...]
> Tristan: I understand you don't give a crap about GNOME as a holistic
> project; you've made it *painfully* clear over the years. I'd like to
> point out that without GNOME working as a single unit nothing we do,
> or did up until now, really matters in the grand scheme of things.
> The
> *only* successful thing out of GNOME is the GNOME desktop environment
> and its whole stack of technologies; everything else has been a
> failure, mostly caused by this inane obsession of considering the
> GNOME platform as a bag of loosely coupled projects that somebody has
> to work hard into identifying and keep working together, granting the
> position of gatekeeper to a bunch of middle men. This position is
> ignorant of the history of the project, especially of its failures;
> it's insulting of the work of hundreds of people who want to keep
> this
> thing working and keep it approachable to newcomers; and completely
> invalidated by the reality of what happens every day in the
> commercial
> space. I also don't understand your opposition to keeping the only
> integration branch we have, the 'master' branch, building constantly,
> considering this is a basic engineering practice, but at this point I
> can barely muster the strength to even care. In any case, as I said
> to
> Milan, I'll gladly consider any project you maintain at the same
> level
> as an external dependency, and thus just tag it. Feel free to go
> through the Continuous manifest and Jhbuild moduleset and point out
> which modules you still maintain.


Emmanuele,

Thank you for sharing this. You make the perfect example.

You will note, that my "astronauting" is in fact a sincere attempt to
reconcile both of these views with some plausible technical approach,
so while your goals are clearly not the same as mine; I am being
sensitive to your goals, in fact I want some team within GNOME to be
successful at integrating all of these projects into some coherent user
experience - I only want that team to accept that the components they
intend to integrate have bigger plans than *just* being a part of this
integrated whole.

You on the other hand seem threatened by my views and consequently act
intolerant towards the existing diversity of goals of projects within
GNOME - I don't think this intolerance is an attitude we should have to
deal with, we should be instead looking for creative ways to reconcile
both views.

Yes, the GNOME Desktop Environment as a unified thing has never been a
personal goal for me to work towards, rather the most important to me
is to build a solid and stable platform with good development tools,
and I want it to be the platform of choice in the FOSS world - if the
GNOME Desktop Environment turns out to be the only consumer of the work
I've done over the years, this will be the biggest failure of all in my
eyes.

You may have accepted defeat but as long as I spend any energy in GNOME
at all, I simply can not.

Regards,
    -Tristan