Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME

Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME

Posted Aug 12, 2012 14:37 UTC (Sun) by ewan (subscriber, #5533)
In reply to: Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME by ovitters
Parent article: Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME

"Stating your beliefs as true doesn't make it true."

No, but you saying that doesn't mean nix's comment is untrue either. Let's have another look at this recent bug report shall we, and see whether the attitude of the Gnome devs could be considered to show contempt towards the users they're communicating with.

- Firstly, a long established feature, commonly understood, available across multiple desktops, has been summarily broken. Already, that shows a degree of contempt.

- Next up, the first response from the Gnome project is to ignore the substance of the bug report completely, and attempt to immediately derail any discussion by telling the reporter off for being mean (which he wasn't). Definitely contemptuous behaviour.

- Having rather rudely told the bug reporter to stick to the technical issues, his (and others') technical concerns about scalability, NFS filesystems and so forth are dismissed with "It isn't a problem because we're not going to be stupid". Absolutely dripping with contempt.

- Another user weighs in to point out that this seems to be a pattern of behaviour from the Gnome project, and is explicitly told to go away, and that what they've said "is NOT welcome".

- Despite having managed to get through some technical discussion on why a search feature (however good it may be) is not a replacement for the removed feature, and doesn't cover the same use cases, the maintainer dismisses the whole bug report by saying that he doesn't "see type-ahead find coming back". There's utter contempt from the project for its users there, and in at least two ways. Firstly; the pointless removal of a useful (and used) feature, and secondly, the attitude that users have to back up what they say with detailed technical arguments and bug reports for every little thing, but the project can just hand down a decision with no such technical supporting case at all.

- The whole report ends with another user explaining at some length why the removed feature is useful, used, and widely expected, and that removing it actually is a bug, and the project's representative responds by threatening to delete his account!

The fact is that the Gnome project is treating its users with contempt, and saying it doesn't need to make it true - it just reflects the reality that it already is.

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