Остальные тоже правы

All the other guys are not wrong

The discussion in blogs and comments on collaboration and standards is really important. It’s also easy to cast as “GNOME vs Canonical vs KDE”, and that would be incorrect. My critique here is not of the body of GNOME developers, it’s of specific decisions and processes, which in my view have let GNOME down.

The reason I care is, to state the obvious, a well-functioning GNOME is important to Ubuntu and Canonical. And I don’t think we’re there. Alternatively, a well-functioning FreeDesktop.org is important, and we’re not there either.

Dave Neary, who to his credit has been trying to understand how matters reached this point, blogged his conclusions to date. They warrant a response.

He summarises:

FreeDesktop.org is broken as a standards body

That may be true today, but I think we should fix it. With Meego around, and other efforts that are lower profile, there are now even more reasons to have well specified standards for desktop interoperability. They won’t all work, but they deserve better respect and quality than they have today. So my response to Dave is: let’s fix that, rather than pretending “it’s broke so it don’t matter”.

Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t understand how GNOME works

Fortunately I’m apparently in good company because his next conclusion is GNOME is not easy to understand. Perhaps a more accurate summation would be “Gnome is not self-consistent, or deterministic, so it can often come to two quite contradictory conclusions at the same time, and Mr Shuttleworth didn’t understand the one we’d now like to promote.”

Dave mailed me to say that he’d got a “definitive” perspective on how the appindicator API’s came to be rejected. It includes pointers as to the requirements for submitting external dependencies. These are “make the case for the dependency, which should be a few sentences or so, and wait a short while for people to check it out (e.g. making sure it builds)”. Now, a reading of the correspondence around the API’s suggests that Ted and others did a lot more than the “few sentences and make sure it builds”, yet the proposal was rejected.