Neary: GNOME Census [LWN.net]

Neary: GNOME Census

Posted Jul 28, 2010 22:18 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
In reply to: Neary: GNOME Census by gouldtj
Parent article: Neary: GNOME Census

Shall we cover the timeline here.

Libappindicator was publicly announced as a consumable codebase when? Dec 2009 on your blog? The plans for GNOME Shell were public when? At least last summer's GUADEC?

http://gnome.mirocommunity.org/video/239/guadec-2009-owen...

Even in your own blog on Dev 16 2009 in a response comment you speak to the GNOME 3 integration issue making it clear you were fully aware that it was diverging from the already existing publicly communicated development roadmap for gnome shell and you thought this was a better way to go. Of course you did, everyone thinks their baby is the cutest. But when did you really sit down and try to have the discussion when it was still early enough to compromise over implementation details?

So what 4 months after GNOME Shell's development intent is publicly communicated you decided to build a competing implementation without public discussion of the short comings of what is planned for GNOME Shell and attempt to get buy in on changing the development roadmap? And once you completed the initial implementation in dev 2009 that people could play with, you waited how long to have a public discussion about how this could be integrated in GNOME Shell?

Remind me, did you find someone to talk about libappindicator at the Gnome UX hackfest at Canonical's London offices prior to submission to the module decisions? Give me a name of the person who you tapped to bring it up for discussion at the UX hackfest. You did sort of say that you were going to find someone to bring it up when the technical discussion about libappindicator came up in the gnome desktop devel list when the technical specifics of libappindicator were being discussed..and well the discussion on the list just sort of died at that point. Seems to me people were expecting someone from Canonical to bring this up for discussion at the hackfest as you stated you couldn't be there in person to finish the conversation.

And well, I didnt see any commentary in any media feeds or lists that I can find that it was brought up by anyone at Canonical at the hackfest. Forget for a moment that Canonical was hosting a hackfast at its own corporate offices and couldn't get you there to make sure this was discussed. Forget for a second how odd that seems if the intention was to make the best effort to get this integrated as a GNOME 3 technology. Did anyone from Canonical try to talk over integrating libappindicator into the GNOME 3 design as part of that hackfest? I can't imagine a more friendly environment to hold that discussion...Canonical's own corporate offices. Did people just forget to communicate that it was discussed because taskpooper was just far more interesting a topic to blog about? (hell ars technica even had a taskpooper column based on the drips and draps of information communicated via blog posts from the Gnome hackfast held at Canonical's offices...but the aforementioned promised discussion about libappindicator integration...nadda)

So yeah, maybe communication from the Canonical side of the fence could haave been better considering that GNOME Shell's roadmap was already public, and you were aware of it, before starting this project, and there were multiple opportunities to interface with people about technical requirements for libappindicator to be suitable for GNOME 3 integration prior to the module submission deadline..and it appears to have failed to occurred.

-jef

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Neary: GNOME Census

Posted Jul 29, 2010 2:41 UTC (Thu) by gouldtj (subscriber, #48027) [Link]

> Shall we cover the timeline here.

Sure, why not.

I think that a better date to track the beginnings of GNOME Shell would be to the 2008 GNOME UX Hackfest. I was there, and infact on the shell team that did the original mockups for what would become GNOME Shell eventually. It was discussed at the Boston Hackfest immediately after. Infact, by the time GUADEC came around it was already packaged for Ubuntu.

One of the things that was discussed as a principle at the original UX Hackfest discussing this was the simplification of the panel. Basic menus, not the notification area hell that had been created. It was widely agreed upon then. I would say that this is also the public origin of the work that would become libappindicator -- though I didn't have time to work on it until later.

At the last GNOME UX Hackfest at Canonical's offices I was not there. The big reason is that I felt that too many Canonical employees attending the hackfest would create a "mob" atmosphere since it was already in the Canonical offices. We decided that Canonical would just send the folks already in London as it was less travel costs, and already more than enough people. I asked Matthew Paul Thomas to discuss Application Indicators with John McCann also at the hackfest. I believe that they did have that discussion, and left with an understanding that AppIndicators aligned with many of the same design goals as Shell along with the fact that we were interested in what changes the Shell team was interested in to make it compatible.

This is infact a similar conversation that I had with John and Marriana at the 2009 GUADEC where we discussed the messaging menu and libindicate which is the application side of the messaging menu. I was concerned that we had asked application developers to support a new API, and that was a big ask, it would be good if no one (us or Shell) would have to ask that again. They said that they wanted to do a little more with the messaging aspects of Shell, but they weren't sure yet, so I left it as "we'd like to work together, tell me what changes we need." As I'd like to make changes so that we could all use the same library for messaging tasks.

So, in review, I most certainly know about GNOME Shell, and I still believe that libappindicator is a great GNOME 2 way to get to the design goals of GNOME Shell. Unfortunately the GNOME Shell team has decided that there is no longer alignment there. I haven't seen any rationale for that, or seen updated design documents that change things signficantly enough to say that the libappindicator methodology no longer aligns.

Thanks,
Ted