Re: 2.4 Proposed Modules - 2 weeks left

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 04:05:42PM +0100, Bill Haneman wrote: 
> Accessibility support is part of the "readiness" equation.  I did not
> say we "could not ship anything without accessibility", though I
> personally do think that we should not include inaccessible components
> in the GNOME official desktop, just as we are reluctant to bundle GUI
> apps that don't use GTK+ or otherwise are not very GNOME-like, without a
> compelling reason.  Otherwise all the usual criteria for inclusion in
> the GEP could be discarded using the same logic.  


The readiness criteria should be "architecture and maintainers
a11y-friendly" not "all a11y bugs fixed." Though certainly if we're
comparing two alternatives, finished a11y in one is a positive point
(that may outweigh or be outweighed by other points); but in this case
we aren't comparing alternatives, unless you are advocating that we
include Mozilla.

It works just like i18n:

 - our process has freezes and such that allow translations to be
   completed
 - some translations are completed if people do the work
 - some translations aren't because no one did the work
 - we ship anyway

Also:
 
 - if one alternative has finished i18n and another has none, 
   then this factors in to an evaluation of those apps

But not:

 - to put something in GNOME all the i18n has to be finished up front

Let's put it this way. If we don't include epiphany, the harms are:

 - we slow down development and testing of our browser significantly
 - we have no browser in GNOME 2.4

Those are big harms. If we do include epiphany, the harms are:

 - we can't say "everything we ship is 100% accessible"

That's just a marketing bullet point, because "we don't have an
accessible browser" is going to be a true statement whether we say we
are 100% accessible or not. The user experience either way is "no
accessible browser" (well, "you have to use Mozilla"). We should not
be holding back technical progress and hurting developers and users so
we can have a better marketing claim. I assure you "cool new browser"
is a better marketing claim anyway...

What's best for moving the technology forward and getting it out to
users? That's what matters.

Not to be melodramatic, but the software industry is a treadmill;
stagnation is death.

Havoc