Re: UI freeze break request for GNOME Shell

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2012-10-26 at 19:18 +0200, Florian Müllner wrote:
> Hey!
> 
> I am really sorry for this, but I'd like to request another freeze
> break for GNOME Shell. As you may know, notifications in the message
> tray now spot a small close button, which may be used to dismiss the
> notification. While we managed to match the mockups pretty well, the
> designers did not agree at all with the implemented behavior of the
> button once they actually were able to try the code[0] - which was
> fairly late unfortunately.
> Yesterday we finally managed to land the requested changes to master,
> but unless we push out a 3.6.2 release including those, we will give
> users six months to become accustomed to the "wrong" behavior, making
> the change far more painful than necessary.
> I have done a quick check on the documentation, it does not look like
> either behavior is currently documented; in terms of code, the changes
> are very small and unintrusive. So my only concern is really to
> irritate users by pushing a change like this in a stable series, which
> is of course far from ideal. Still, I believe it will be much more
> disruptive at a later point, so including it in a 3.6.2 release
> constitutes the lesser evil in my opinion.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Florian
> 
> [0] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=682237

I'm deferring to Mike Hill for the docs impact. He's been through
these pages more than anybody else this release cycle.

Meta: How can we prevent these kinds of late-cycle changes in the
future? Part of the problem may be implementing from mockups with
insufficient specification of behavior. But there will always be
implementation issues you don't anticipate in design specs.

What about a concerted effort to test implementations against the
designs immediately following the freeze?

--
Shaun