Re: The storage interface cleanup - incredible

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Michael Meeks <michael helixcode com> writes:

> 
> > So we are not going to say no to you, Dietmar. We will leave it up
> > to Miguel and Michael to keep their own promises.
> 
> 	Miguel gave an assurance of an API freeze to calm you down
> and a date; well after that date was passed Eazel were sending patches
> adding new features to the code. Consequently we might be forgiven for
> assuming that Eazel had adopted a more reasonable position on the
> technical merits of getting Bonobo right.
> 

As I understood it, the API freeze was never intended to preclude
API changes needed to fix bugs.

Again, the decision is up to you as maintainer, so please have the
guts to say yes or no yourself instead of trying to get someone else
to make a decision for you.

> > P.S. Sorry if I included any Top Seekrit info in this post, but I
> > don't think the obligations the Bonobo maintainers entered into
> > should be a secret.
> 
> 	The most interesting thing to me that came out of that call (
> that neither of us was involved in ) was that Eazel admitted to trying
> to "force" the Bonobo maintainers to do something that was in our view
> both technicaly the wrong decision, and also not in the interests of
> the Gnome 1.4 platform. [ to whit shipping with the old feature
> incomplete, bug-riddled UI handler ]. 

It's a good thing you put scare quotes around the word "force" because
we can't force you to do anything. You're the maintainer and we're
not. Rather, we made a heartfelt plea to use the old, stable, tested
UI handler, rather than the new, untested, unstable, hastily coded and
designed UI handler, since we felt this would seriously damage the
schedule for Nautilus 1.0 and GNOME 1.4, and in fact it has blown out
our schedule a fair bit.

But that's water under the bridge, we accepted that change and decided
to support it and do our best to fix up the new UI handler (as in my
opinion we should have done when it first happened - but that too is
water under the bridge).

> Unfortuately I was on the receiving end of a lot of this forcing the
> stresss of which was not so good for me:

I know there's people who have a different view of who was subjected
to forcing and stress than you do, but please let's not get into a he
said/she said game.

> 
> 	So; it seems that once again ( if you are representing the company
> accurately Maciej, which I hope you are not ) Eazel is again trying to
> force a technicaly awful decision into bonobo in order to avoid some (
> totaly insignificant ) impact on their Nautilus product.

We cannot force anything. We can only state our opinion. You and
Miguel are the maintainers and we have no veto on the process. Please
do not pretend otherwise; I certainly have not seen patches being run
by us. As maintainer, you could have just said yes to Dietmar's
change. What do you think we're going to do, revert his check in?

> In summary, it begins to look as if Eazel care a lot more about
> shipping their product than doing the right thing for Gnome.

Plase don't wrap yourself in the flag like this. We're interested in
doing the right thing for Gnome as much as you are. We just happen to
think that doing the right thing requires actually shipping the
software to users at some point.

It's impossible to get everything perfect on the first try, and the
(in some ways laudable) desire to do so must be balanced against the
need to ship.

In fact, the Stream interface is almost certainly going to change for
GNOME 2.0 anyway, if we follow the wise advise of the Sun people who
pointed out that factoring the interface into InputStream,
OutputStream and Seekable is a better way to go. So you can't even
pretend this particular change will prevent interface breakage down
the line.

In any case, the bottom line is that it's up to you to sort out your
various maintainerly obligations and make a decision. Please don't
beat up on the Nautilus team for having an opinion (none of were even
going to say anything until you specifically asked on IRC for someone
from the Nautilus team to say something) or for the fact that you made
an agreement with us. I'm not going to post any more on this thread
because I refuse to take further such abuse. Please sort it out for
yourself.

 - Maciej