Re: This list, suggestions, frustration

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Tue, 2010-07-06 at 14:28 +0100, Shane Fagan wrote:

> I understand what your saying but I think its a little bit near-sighted
> IMO. I think this list should be more used by the developers for
> feedback about design. Most people cant watch IRC 9-5 5 days a week at
> the times you guys work just in case something comes up that they might
> be interested in because of day jobs and time constraints. Not
> everything can come up on IRC and not everything can be filed as a bug
> report. 

Unfortunately, we can't be on IRC 24/7. So it's going to be inconvenient
for some people. I think we're pretty accessible to people in Europe -
since US working hours are evening hours in Europe. If there was
interest, I suspect we could augment the current Wednesday afternoon
"design office hours" with a time in the US evening on some day.

But the essential property about IRC is that it's give and take. If you
want to help out with the design of the shell, you can find out what we
actually need help with.

> Is an opinion on a dodgy design decision worthy of a bug report? I know
> this mailing list can get a bit crowded at times and developers cant
> look at everything but you cant really think that ignoring it is the
> best option. 

To be blunt, an opinion on a dodgy design decision just isn't that
interesting at the monent. We really have as much self-reported opinion
as we can possibly deal with.

There's nothing wrong with people sending reports about their
experiences here. Or in blog posts. Or on Twitter. But it's unreasonable
to expect that every such report is going to get a response.

> I accept your point about the kind of people who subscribe to mailing
> lists but what if it was a user just curious installs Gnome Shell (its
> fairly easy I dont know how other distros do it but in Ubuntu/Debian is
> simple sudo apt-get install gnome-shell) and this person has an issue so
> they ask some to point them to the place to mention it and someone
> points them here hoping for an answer to their real world feedback and
> they should be ignored just because they found their way here instead of
> IRC? 

Don't misunderstand me about IRC. IRC is not the correct place to
express your opinions about the GNOME Shell design. It's a place to work
with the designers on improving it.

> It just seems like you are cutting off the one avenue for some people to
> participate their views and try to get involved which isnt really in the
> spirit of what Gnome stands for IMO. I know you will still look at the
> list and reply if it suits you and you have time but its not good to
> discount a valid means of communication.

To me, GNOME has always been a community of poeple working together to a
common end. We've always tried to be as welcoming as possible to new
people to that community. But our success is not the size of the
community. It's our ability as a community to generate a great end
result.

So, the real question, the real challenge, isn't being receptive and
listening to what people have to say. It's moving forward and making
things better.

- Owen