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[Paul W. Frields]

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
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://paul.frields.org/   -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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