Flame retardant # 1

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico nuclecu unam mx>]

Hello,

It seems that the flames are pretty high in gnome-gui-list these days,
so I though I may try to clear some things up.

I have not followed all the discussion here, mostly due to it being
crap, but it seems that people are failing to agree on issues that
need to be adressed by the Gnome Style Guide.

Mr. Poag contacted the Gnome project some months ago.  I talked a bit
to him over irc, and he seemed like a reasonably experienced person to
lead the development of the Style Guide -- he told me about his
previous work on a style guide for the defunct Insight project, and it
seemed like a good thing to have on Gnome.

I specifically asked Mr. Poag to release portions of the Style Guide
to his web page as soon as he was able to type them in (on our talks
on irc, he said that he had most of his thoughts as sketches on
paper).  I am very disappointed that his web page has no content yet,
even after more than six weeks since I asked him to do that.  I have
not been able to find any useful content there.  My hopes were that
everyone would be able to look at the preliminary versions of the
Style Guide, and comment on them to reach an agreement on how things
ought to be done.

I am not asking that all of the Style Guide be put up in the web page
in just a few days; I just asked for parts of it to be released as
soon as possible.  I cannot force Mr. Poag to do this, since Gnome is
not paying him to do the Style Guide, of course, but I would expect to
have something available by now.

Also, I am very disappointed that there have been personal comments
against other members of the Gnome team, specifically against Maciej
Stachowiak.  Mr. Stachowiak has done an excellent job as a programmer
for the Gnome project, and I think that he deserves respect from
people who have not contributed code yet.

On behalf of the Gnome list, I would like to apologize to
Mr. Stachowiak for the comments that were made against him.  

I would also like to ask Mr. Poag and everyone else to be open to
suggestions and criticism about the Style Guide.  As far as I know, no
one on this mailing list has a really clear idea about what the final
Gnome Style Guide should be like, so people should have in mind that
whatever they suggest at first will be criticized and possibly mangled
beyond recognition for the final version.

  Federico