On Mon, 2008-10-27 at 10:25 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
On Mon, 2008-10-27 at 07:44 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> If I recall correctly this was discussed to death in the GNOME upstream
> back when it was changed many, many moons ago. You can feel free to
> take this request to the upstream rather than here in Fedora.
FWIW, it was also recently discussed at the GNOME UI hackfest in Boston
http://live.gnome.org/Boston2008/GUIHackfest
with some real data (e.g. City of Largo of presentation) suggesting that
spatial might not be the best default.
This is interesting, thanks.
You are of course correct that we should normally follow what
upstream
do; however occasionally we do change some defaults (for better or
worse). In this case, I don't think it's clear, a lot of data (the Largo
presentation, other distros, just observing users) might suggest the
current default is not the best one. I don't know.
I don't either -- I presume that the GNOME community makes these choices
based on some guiding principles of design and usability. I don't claim
to know what those are, though. If they
Also, this begs the question about how we make decisions what our
product looks like. There are many possible answers to that and it
always depend on the circumstances; some people suggest voting (!),
other suggests following upstream, sometimes a group of people in some
committee makes a decision (packaging guidelines; FESCO overrides) and
then there's the package-maintainer-gets-to-decide fiefdom (like our
firewall maintainer deciding to break .local name resolution (in F9 at
least) because of "security" "concerns").
It seems the latter one is how Fedora works; with most maintainers
opting to follow upstream.
Which, not coincidentally, is in agreement with Fedora's overall
objectives. In cases where groups are involved, we usually try to
achieve consensus as the easiest way to make decisions, resorting to
voting when that doesn't work, or when the decision-making group is
itself a representative group.
For most packages this is probably fine but
for things like the desktop (and user experience in general) it's a
little different.
FWIW, I personally don't think any of these are good answers. Often I
think it would be useful if we had a good dictator to tell us what to do
(in the Linus is the dictator of the kernel way).
Who exactly do you believe should be that dictator?
--
Paul W. Frields
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