Re: Questions for candidates

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Richard,

On Mon, 2003-11-24 at 08:23, Richard Stallman wrote:
> Whenever a free software project becomes large, we divide it into various
> parts that are worked on by different people.  That is the only way to get
> the job done, but it creates an opening for a problem to happen: the
> maintainers of various parts tend to focus on the improvement of their
> individual parts, and even the popularity of their individual parts, rather
> than on the overall goal.  This often leads to get conflicts between the
> parts.

	This rather assumes that it's advisable, and good to have a 100% common
vision. My feeling is that while acting in a vaguely co-ordinated
fashion is good, that moving emacs to target the average user, and
moving Gnome more to target the hyper-active hacker is a mistake. These
projects have different domains which overlap in perhaps ~0.5% of
Gnome's eventual target user base's useage.

> This occurs at the level of the whole GNU Project--for example, GNOME's
> default bindings define Meta-TAB which gets in the way of using Emacs.
> There is potential for this to happen within GNOME as well.
...
> To maintain its unity, the larger project needs to have a way of persuading
> the maintainers of various parts, when necessary, to turn their attention
> to the needs of the whole.

	Not convinced that 'unity' is important at the Meta-TAB level;
especially if this involves some level of top-down control. IMHO the
people doing the coding / integration / packaging get to make these
calls, and they should certainly not be made to conform to some archaic
choice made a decade ago that perhaps doesn't gell well with the
pragmatic reality of what people expect from a desktop today.

> There are many possible ways to do this, but the first step (which may be
> sufficient) is to define the maintainers' mission as taking a
> responsibility in developing the larger project.  In other words, we should
> not encourage the idea that they, as coders, are autonomous and in charge
> of their domains.  That would encourage the tendency towards fragmentation.

	Of course maintainers should work together :-) whomever is actively
hacking on emacs should get together with the metacity maintainer, and
(presumably) the windows-port-of-emacs guys, and the Gnome UI/style
guys, and work out what makes most sense for Meta-Tab. I do think the
conclusion is obvious however.

	Regards,

		Michael.

-- 
 michael ximian com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot