Re: Why do features disappear?!?!?!?!?!?!?

[Ole Laursen <olau hardworking dk>]

Andy Lewis <ajl ascii27 net> writes:

> Is anybody actually paying attention to this?

I think it's difficult not to.

> All the nice new features are only so cool if every time once gets
> added something else that WORK gets dropped. I have been a software
> developer for 20 years, and I admit to being completely and utterly
> baffled by this approach to releases. Is there any kind of
> development principal in place about not stripping out really useful
> features during development?

If the release team thinks there is a serious enough regression, they
can request that an older release is used. I think that happened with
Yelp last time because of accessibility issues. It is my impression
that people are serious about regressions, but sometimes it's a
trade-off and I don't think regressions are necessarily considered
show-stoppers.

> Is there any explanation? Or is it simply usefulness becoming a
> lower priority than architecture changes or standards compliance?

Development within GNOME does not necessarily equal getting more
features, it is about making a better desktop. Sometimes some things
have to go to avoid clutter and get a better overall product.

Also, code bitrots, and if there is noone around interesting in fixing
it, it will eventually stop working. Combine this with the fact that
the releases are time-based, and you can get a situation where
upgrading to a new technology means that some of the old features are
lost and reimplementing them has to wait for later releases.

You may not agree with all decisions, but you need to remember that
you may not be representative of the target audience which has
different priorities than you. If you badly want some features back
in, you need to investigate whether they fall in the category of being
unwanted in stock GNOME (or requiring rework to be accepted) or simply
not being reimplemented because of lack of resources. If it's the
latter, it's a good chance of helping out and having some fun.

-- 
Ole Laursen
http://www.cs.aau.dk/~olau/