Re: Some notes on GNOME Shell

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 11:57 +0200, Patryk Zawadzki wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:11 AM, Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> wrote:
> > "The secret master plan"
> >
> >  Boy do I wish I had a secret master plan tucked in a drawer
> >  somewhere! It would be really useful....
> >
> >  To the extent we have a master plan, it's in two documents
> >  that everybody has seen:
> >
> > http://www.gnome.org/~mccann/shell/design/GNOME_Shell-20091114.pdf
> > http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/RoadmapTwoThirtyOne
> 
> I think the community would love to see some more "why" behind the "how" :)
> 
> For example I'd like to know why shell reinvents the graphical toolkit
> and comes with a (hardcoded?) theme which in turn makes it look out of
> place. Or why JS and not LUA or Python. I'm sure there was some
> evaluation behind these decisions but I'm not even sure where to dig.

how about starting from the wiki page of the project? there's a lot of
information, rationales and links to discussions. but, ultimately: it's
a choice from the maintainers and I expect people accept decisions from
the maintainers of a project because - well, they are the ones doing the
damned work.

> It's details like this that make the project look more like OpenOffice
> than a GNOME app ("here's the resulting code" versus "here are the
> plans and the rationale, please discuss").

what's fundamental is that not everything should be open to discussion.

sure, if you disagree on the choice of colors in the CSS theme then you
can discuss it with the UI design team - as long as you avoid
bike-shedding them to death because that's not nice and all; but if you
want to discuss the language of choice then you misunderstood how an
open source project works. the gnome-shell developers decided, and you
either follow them or you can start writing your own shell in your own
language.

I wouldn't assume people started questioning every single decision taken
12 months ago (or even farther back) because that's an incredible amount
of what the damn kids today call "stop energy" - and in general it's not
even worth following up to every crank that sends an email saying "you
should have used LUA!!11!1 JS suckzZzZzZ".

as for design, it's even simpler: just because open source convinced a
lot of hackers that they could design user interfaces it's a pure fact
that not everyone should even be allowed to design. you need training,
and you need specific competences. mocking up something in Inkscape is
*not* one of those competences - though it helps. after working for two
years with a great design team I can only have the greatest amount of
respect for whoever does this for a living. people sending random
mockups are far, far away from the kind of people you want contributing
design ideas for a successful user experience. whoever thinks otherwise
is seriously mistaken, and lives in a fantasy land of ponies and
unicorns and rainbows.

+++

the GNOME Shell design and development process, as somebody that looks
at it (slightly) from the outside, and since its inception, has been
nothing *but* open. it's your classic open source meritocratic project,
with two benevolent dictators that ultimately make the calls on
technology and design. there's *nothing* new. they happen to be RedHat
employee just because they started the project; GIO has been written by
a RedHat employee and yet I don't see masses in revolt because the
community didn't have a greater deal of control on it. hell, half our
current platform has been written by RH employees and everyone seems to
be using it, contributing to it and improving it. 

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi