On Tue, 2009-10-20 at 20:17 -0400, William Jon McCann wrote: > Going to reply to this one only because it is convenient. General > response to the activity today. > > I'm going to try to say pretty much exactly the same thing that Owen > did... but in my way. > > Here's the deal. We see a bug - we fix a bug. Often it is as simple > as that. Here's a fictional reconstruction of more or less what > occurred with respect to the changes that have been discussed today. > > Me: Matthias, I've finally had a chance to sit down and look closely > at what we're doing in our default panel configuration. Holy crap - > it sucks. We knew that of course. And the Shell is going to fix some > of these bugs. But here are a few changes that I think we can make in > the short term that make F12 look a bit more polished. [I rattle off > a few things] > Matthias: Hey, those sound pretty reasonable. And they shouldn't be > hard to fix. > [after not much time at all - in this case only a few hours I think] > Matthias: Hey what do you think of this? [has everything done] > Me: Holy crap - you're a stud. Looks much better! > Matthias: Cool. I'll email the Fedora desktop community and push out > some packages. > Me: You rock. > the bar. Could have occurred anywhere. Did it make sense to poll the > community first? No. This was a small change that in our opinion > makes things better. Does our opinion matter more than yours? It > may... Why? Because this is in essence still a meritocracy and we > have trust relationships that may not be immediately evident to the > casual observer. Does that mean that we don't listen to anyone? > Absolutely not. Ideas some from many sources. But at the end of the > day someone has to sift through them and pick out the ones that shine. I don't think anyone's debating any of the above. The important issues that have been raised are different: basically that this was not necessarily a good time in the release cycle to make these changes, as they are not generally expected to happen post-Beta (though we do need to make this more explicit), and it makes things tough on the documentation front, as we are past the translation freeze for the Release Notes, where this kind of change should be documented. Also that it would be a good idea to *notify* (note: not poll) the community about changes beforehand. I understand that it's much less pain to be able to just make what seem to you to be sensible changes in this kind of casual and _fast_ way no matter where you are in the release cycle, but you're curating something that's very important to probably millions of people: the layout of the desktop they spend hours and hours a day interacting with. There's a reasonable case for applying some sensible precautions to this. This is not to say that all change is bad and should be opposed out of principle, simply that it should happen at appropriate stages of the cycle (and, as I've mentioned, other groups have work to do to make this more clear) and with appropriate notification (which I'm more worried about than discussion). I'd also add the minor point that the tag request which was accepted to get these changes into F12 did not explain the changes. That's not good. The 2.28.0-5 tag request just says "contains a number of tweaks to our default panel configuration that make the appearance of the panel more pleasant", but doesn't explain what they are. It was obsoleted in favour of the 2.28.0-6 tag request without anyone from releng actually reading it, it seems, and the 2.28.0-6 tag request does not mention the padding or 'desktop icon' changes at all. https://fedorahosted.org/rel-eng/ticket/2488 - -5 tag request https://fedorahosted.org/rel-eng/ticket/2501 - -6 tag request -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- Fedora-desktop-list mailing list Fedora-desktop-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-desktop-list
