Why gpdf default again?

[Alexander Larsson]

On Thu, 2004-10-07 at 11:57 +0200, Mohamed Eldesoky wrote:
> Well, I will reply for you and  Alexander Larsson   and the rest of the list.
> 
> 1- I didn't mean at all to underestimate Warren.
> 2- I wasn't putting silly comments, or raising the signal/noise ratio
> 
> I said it as a comment that I felt there is no clear procedure on what
> goes in and what not. Even RH engineers don't have a reference to go
> to regarding why something is added or not !!
> It was my point of view, and I think it is my right to see clear
> procedures that clarifies what certain settings are made in my
> preferred distro.
> 
> Back to the main topic.

I'm not sure what sort of procedures you think would work? Each change
would have to be reviewed by someone? Someone must ok every change made
to the distro?

Red hat is extremely understaffed compared to most other software
development teams. Add to this the fact that we don't write all of the
software we're shipping, so we don't have full control of it. If we were
to have some sort of super-detailed procedure we'd have to follow for
each change we wouldn't get much done at all. We'd have to verify every
change linus accepts, every change to gnome, and every change we do. We
wouldn't have any time to actually develop new code or fix bugs.

In this case, the mime system was completely rewritten in this release,
and the default config had to be rewritten for it. I did my best to
transcribe the old defaults to the new system, but anyone can make
mistakes. I can't figure out any procedure that would have caught that
mistake.

Well, thats not entierly true. There is one way I know to find such
problems. The free software way, release early and have interested
people test the stuff and report problems. This is what we're trying to
do, and it worked in this case.

The problem is, developers don't have time for eternal discussions that
seem to pop up often when we post anything to a public list. The actual
development talk easily gets lost in unrelated responses. At the moment
that is causing a lot of developers to hesitate about posting things on
public lists, which is bad for the Fedora project. I'm not sure what to
do about this, but if we can't solve it the resulting software will
suffer.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl at redhat.com    alla at lysator.liu.se 
He's a time-tossed Catholic waffle chef looking for 'the Big One.' She's a 
manipulative blonde vampire with a knack for trouble. They fight crime!