Looking a Novell gift horse in the mouth

Looking a Novell gift horse in the mouth

Posted Feb 9, 2006 10:15 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
Parent article: Looking a Novell gift horse in the mouth

Interesting article. A bit odd though, especially the comment about how you don't want to post design because people complain with comments like:

"you can't make the panel menu depend on beagle!!!"

Huh? That's not a design issue, that's an implementation detail. A design is more like saying we take layer K out of the X server and put it into a library that depends on OpenGL. Rationale is Y.

The design should be aimed at people who are knowledgable about the program (in this case the X server). What you put forth is an overview about what you want to acheive and which parts are likely to be affected and let people comment on it. If you don't like the responses, you can ignore them. You don't need to have a vote, if you get good ideas, incorporate them. If you don't, don't.

In this sense it is good to have seperate mailing lists for users, advanced users and hackers. Users are end users, advanced users are getting familiar with the code and hackers is where the real hacking happens. The last group will be quite small as most people have no idea how the server works. This is the group your design should be aimed at. The other groups are not relevent to the discussion because they don't have the background.

(Just in case people think I'm discriminating against users, most things that get discussed are design changes that have almost zero impact on the end user. Things might get faster or more flexible, but the end result isn't going to look fundamentally different. The end users in this case are designers of applications for X, not the end users of gnome. As long as source code compatability is preserved, they don't need to care.)

Anyway, just my 2c.

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