Re: Release coordination - a clarification

[Seth Aaron Nickell <snickell Stanford EDU>]

On Fri, Jun 22, 2001 at 11:11:19PM +0200, ERDI Gergo wrote:
> On 22 Jun 2001, Martin Baulig wrote:
> 
> > * It annoyed me a lot that two core members of the GNOME team don't believe
> >   in what I think is the future of GNOME (= Bonobo) and that they're
> >   discussion to write their own system instead. It also annoyed me a
> >   lot that they were criticizing my work in libgnome(ui) even if they
> >   didn't care at all about it.
> 
> Actually, I think it is a good thing if at least some of us remain open to
> new ideas. If we trust our current dogmas too much, we might miss
> considering other possibilities.

The project  would be very sick if we didn't have differing "driving 
visions" for GNOME. I think a lot of these visions merely result from 
people having differing interests. For example, I don't give a rats ass 
about Bonobo as a goal in and of itself (ok, that's not entirely true, new 
technologies can be inherently fun). Instead I'm interested in making 
GNOME a neat environment for users, both in terms of improving the 
interface and working on features that users can touch and feel. I think 
Bonobo is one way (a good one) for improving programmer efficiency, and 
hence increasing the ability to improve the user experince (and it also 
adds some neat new possibilities to users, like selecting their favorite 
image view etc).

But I don't expect or even *desire* that everyone shares this vision for 
GNOME. It makes me happy that people, like Michael for example, want to 
hack on Bonobo, because I can use the tools and techniques they develop to 
fufill my visions for GNOME. Not everyone has to believe monikers are the 
best thing since sliced bread for the project to succesfully deploy 
monikers where they are useful. Its true, sometimes we will have 
conflicting visions. Perhaps we will eventually come to conflict directly 
over C vs. CORBA intfaces, or whatever. That's why its important to have a 
voting mechanism in place. Unfortunately flamewars fail to give a sense of 
the support on either side of the argument. All they do is pull 
individuals out of the crowd and pit them against eachother. Rather than 
"most people want X" the flamewar is primarily conducive to "Joe is 
fighting with Jack and Jill". 

-Seth