Re: Some notes on GNOME Shell

[Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>]

Le jeudi 03 juin 2010 à 12:12 +0200, Vincent Untz a écrit :
<snip>
> Really, how is it different from what's happening in any other module? I
> can certainly blame Guillaume and Xavier for not being able to have
> metacontacts in empathy today while it's something I asked two years
> ago; but they've chosen to do it the way they believe is right, which
> happens to take more time. What was the way for me to change this? It's
> easy: I could have get more involved and send a patch.
> 
> That's the same for GNOME Shell. (Except that for the design part, you
> don't send a patch, you participate in a discussion and the discussion
> should be well argued.)
I think the difference is that the Shell /is/ the GNOME desktop. It's
the main change for the GNOME 3 user experience, and it's influencing
everything you may do with your desktop.

If you're not happy with Empathy, you can switch to Pidgin and still
think you're using stock GNOME. But within one year, if you don't use
the Shell, you'll feel out of place.

That alone is IMHO enough to justify that the Shell design and
development is different from others', and requires discussion - just
like designing an API requires some amount of feedback from the
developers that will use it.

I'm not saying the Shell devs are doing this wrong, but here's how I
conceive the situation, which explains that people have higher
expectations than for other modules.


Regards