Re: A few observations about GIMPNET

[Olivier Sessink <olivier bluefish openoffice nl>]

as an occasional IRC user, let me add some points that I haven't heard
until now.

On 10/15/2012 01:54 PM, Sebastian Keller wrote:
[..]
> I have seen people on #gnome on freenode asking for the official
> channels of gnome components, but those were very very few and almost
> all of them were asking for support and not how to contribute to
> development. (Assuming they tried #gnome after they found out #gnome-*
> does not exist) The only exception was #gtk+ but nobody was interested
> in development of gtk just development with gtk.
[..]

1) a nice desktop without applications is kind of useless. If we can
attract more people to develop applications that would be a huge win for
GNOME. Developing gtk is not the only thing that needs to be done.

2) There is one certainty here: if people that request support do not
get answers, they will never become a happy user, and if they never
become a happy user, they will not start to contribute. There are many
phases from newbie to user to heavy user to contributor to developer.
Supporting them in one infrastructure might ease the move from one phase
to the next, and might bring us more developers in the end. I think this
is a thing that Ubuntu does well.

3) I found myself quite a few times doing /join #gtk+ without the result
that I hoped for. If you are an occasional IRC user it is confusing that
the gnome channels suddenly do not exist anymore (after a while you get
the idea that you are on the wrong network). If you are new to IRC and
you try to join of of the channels you might even think that the GNOME
community is dead. So having a single infrastructure might be just
easier to understand for novice users.

So please don't restrict the discussion to the heavy users and core
developers. We also need the users!

Olivier

-- 
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Blog http://oli4444.wordpress.com/