Re: About GNOME 2.0 - The end of a dream

[Joe Shaw <joe ximian com>]

> *** Many people had opinions on a matter they did not know anything about ***
> 
> Many people stated their position based on very slim evidence, very
> slim understanding of the problem.

Beyond that, though, there exists a larger problem: Who is maintaining
some of these modules is unclear, and the plan and vision for GNOME 2 is
neither well-communicated nor completely agreed upon among these
maintainers.

It is pretty clear that Michael is the libbonobo and libbonoboui
maintainer, but who is in charge of libgnome and libgnomeui? Martin? If
we were going to shift to bonobo-conf, why was it at least perceived as
a major shift in the platform to everyone but Michael, Martin and
Dietmar? Why was, for example, Havoc not aware of it?

I'm not suggesting that we have to do a big "design by committee", but I
thought we had made pretty good progress and reached a reasonable
compromise at GUADEC. While I trust the maintainers to do adequate code
review, the platform won't work if *all* of them aren't on the same
page. It might be nice if the people primarily working on the platform
sent a quick status or even just a "heads up" mail to the lists (lets
agree on a list: gnome-2-0-list) regularly so that this sort of thing
doesn't happen again. And if there is some disagreement, let's try to
make technical arguments both ways and arrive at a compromise.

Joe