Re: Questions

[Ali Akcaagac <aliakc web de>]

Danilo Segan wrote:
> It's as simple as this: you're claiming to provide a full Gnome,
> yet you neglect one part which I consider important (and which I
> contributed to). I'm not talking about political correctness, I'm
> talking about natural reactions to such stuff. I don't doubt many
> folks in here don't care much (if at all) about Serbian
> translation, but if they start removing it from their projects in
> Gnome CVS (after all, cvs.gnome.org is tight on diskspace ;), that
> would be a blow in the face for me and many others who have worked
> on that translation.

Hello Danilo,

well your reaction is understandable but the same way you feel sad that
your contribution has not been taken care of the same way I for my own
do feel sad that CVSGnome has been ignored even after I have fixed this
issue and this is over one year ago. After all I do offer a choice to
people and I only claim to be compliant to a certain GNOME version.

Regardless to that I do believe that what Nat Friedman wrote in his
Membership clause (see link in another reply) does make a lot of sense
even in other parts within GNOME. I for my own did far more
contributions to GNOME than CVSGnome (Balsa, Galeon, my own stuff etc.).
I used to be quite an active person and I bet that until now I would
have contributed even more if I didn't had the feeling all the time to
be some sort of attachment of a community. Permanently being told what
to do, what to not do, being controlled or even get the feeling that
GNOME isn't as free anymore as it initially was etc. All the PR spread
by the same people over and over again e.g. 'millions of happy GNOME
users worldwide' and yet it's impossible to find a handful of people for
rotation of the Board Members or the Release Team sounds quite strange
to me.

Getting active developers for GNOME is not as easy as you may imagine,
there is a lot of work to do. Learning the API, digging for hours into
source code (because they often cover more undocumented API than you may
get even from a gtk-doc generated referemce). Learning what to use and
what to avoid. This all takes time, time that I for my own have spent
for quite some time. It takes quite a long time to get developers to a
point where they are usable for a project but it requires less of a
second to kill them off.

The same way I feel I do believe many others feel too e.g. all the
people who like to see their hours of work becoming part of GNOME but
where their contribution got rejected because the Release Team has
decided so. People are all emotional, I am, you are, others are and they
all have a right to be so. GNOME is getting bigger, the work of the
Foundation is important, people are important as well their opinion is
important too.

I know I am sounding a bit philosophical now and it may not necessarily
fit into this conversation but I do thank Glynn, Eric and the others for
clarification. But I would not like to ask whether we can forget about
CVSGnome for a moment and look forward whether the problems of an
increasing community and the things around it can be solved in a better
way one day and I am sure that the Foundation people already got the
signal from this little thread.

greetings,

Ali Akcaagac