Re: User oriented release notes



El dg 10 de 09 del 2006 a les 07:56 +0100, en/na Joachim Noreiko va
escriure:

> But there is this perception that developers on Free
> projects "work only on what they want to work on" and
> "only on what's fun"

Like Claus says, "Yeah, nice story. ;-)"  :)  The GNOME release cycle
has rules, developers are free to join the release but if they do, they
follow the commonly agreed rules. 

This is not entirely true either for many developers hired by GNOME
stakeholders i.e. advisory board companies. Note that these companies
have technical, marketing and business visions integrated, their good
developers know and integrate these visions in their work.


> , and that therefore, for example,
> you "can't demand that bug X be fixed"... 

I'm not saying this either. Demand a bug to be fixed is a technical
decision and falls into the technical process, no marketing and
""business"" people can come and decide that (unless they solve the bug
with their own hands). 

Very different than agree from the technical, marketing and ""business"
perspectives that Feature X is a priority for the next GNOME release and
therefore all the related bugs have a priority, inviting the
contributors to concentrate efforts there. 

> developers resent any outside intervention, whether that's by marketing,
> documentation, or usability people.

In GNOME we have a goal: "to create a computing platform for use by the
general public that is completely free software". Anybody working for
that goal can't be perceived as "outside intervention".

You mean the developers that also resent about user feedback at all?  :)
I have the impression that thanks to many good GNOME developers, this
resentment is clearly tagged as uncool and unprofessional. Not good
enough for a official GNOME release.

> and the big decisions get deferred indefinitely.

It is much easier to agree on big decisions when there is a common
vision and roadmap. The problem is that having a common vision and a
roadmap is in itself a big decision.  :)  

Small decisions + iterations are a good approach to big decisions. We
can have small decisions to integrate marketing and ""business"" visions
in the technical vision of GNOME 2.18. Then we improve in the next
release.

-- 
Quim Gil /// http://desdeamericaconamor.org | http://guadec.org

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