Re: Some notes on GNOME Shell

[Sergey Panov <sipan sipan org>]

On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 11:31 +0100, Emmanuele Bassi wrote: 
> 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.

I second Patryk's observation that it is not easy to fish info from the
discussion archives. There should be some easy to find FAQ for
developers that are curious about "why", not just "how" and "what" 

> > 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.

...

> 
> 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".
> 
... 
> +
> 
> 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;

I sense a suspicion from the outsiders (not RedHat employees) that
project is not just manned by the RedHat employees, but controlled by
the company. When design/architecture decisions are made within the
company in most of the cases you get, at best, monstrosities like an
OpenOffice.

> 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.
>