Re: irc summary

[Chris Jantzen <chris maybe net>]

Dan Kaminsky writes:
 > >[Developers don't want to do SG research, they just wanna write programs.
 > >They'll do whatever the style guide says.]
 > 
 > We saw a good amount of disagreement about that in the conference, and those
 > are from key GNOME programmers.  Pavlov wrote Balsa.

I'm not saying they are predisposed do whatever the style guide
says. I'm saying if they know what's good for them, they'll do what
the style guide says. Look at Tipton's comments: the Mac's Style Guide
really *pissed* some programmers off, but the Mac ended up being
better for it. This is what is 'toe stepping' about what I've said:
what the current developers want is completely irrelevant in the Big
Picture of World Domination <tm>. I am even saying this as a current
developer. Programmers tend to be the worst judges of human interface
issues. (Again, offsensive to people, but think about that in
general--remember in the Big Picture we are, in a sense, actually
trying to attract all those bad programmers at Microsoft.)

 > Amen.  Now, the nasty part is figuring out what goes where.  But, as I said
 > earlier...I give *ZERO* on basic clipboard functionality.  Any GUI that
 > doesn't do clipboards to a reasonable extent is buggy, period, end of
 > discussion.

Amen to that...

 > I'm 100% behind screenplays, since Xlab looks like it does all the work for

Oh, I'm not against screenplays, just offering as a 'fer example'.

 > >expects. In good business, the Customer Is Always Right. In the World
 > >Domination <tm> perspective, coding is *all* about pleasing the
 > 
 > How does this step on toes?  Seems to me Linux is the ONLY OS to please the
 > customer.

If the developer is the customer, yes. If the user is the customer,
Linux is failing very much in the GUI/ease-of-use arena [though making
headway!]. And I love Linux to pieces as much as the next man.

As an excellent example: That little paperclip guy in Office 97 drives
me nuts. As does it most tech's I know. However, most users I know
love him to pieces. He is a patch for a poorly designed, overweight
application suite, and he may be completely inapplicable to what the
user actually needs on GNOME, but I think you'd be hard pressed to
convince these people to switch to an OS that failed to feature these
sorts of things. I think most current Open Source developers would
cyber-tar-and-feather you for demanding the paperclip guy as a SG
requirement. But you'd certainly be justified in requiring it.

There are and will be hard decisions. I believe the SG group needs to
make certain decisions with an iron fist (though with an open mind to
suggestions). Linus offers an excellent example: In the end, whether
patches make it into Linux or not depends entirely on Linus' whim. He
has earned his peers' trust that his judgement is sound. I'll be the
first to voice my general trust in Bowie's and Dan's judgement. Sure
people may disagree on fine, nitpicky points, but I think in general
they're headed in the right direction.

-- 
chris jantzen kb7rnl =-> 
---------------------------------------------------
systems administrator |    __O   |          student
maybe.net             |  _`\<,_  |     oregon state
possibly the best     | (*)/ (*) | computer science
---------------------------------------------------
  http://www.maybe.net/ - mailto:chris@maybe.net