Iterative development/continuous improvement

Posted Aug 10, 2010 0:14 UTC (Tue) by otaylor (subscriber, #4190)
In reply to: Iterative development/continuous improvement by sladen
Parent article: Ubuntu: "We have no plans to fork GNOME" (derStandard.at)

It's never a problem that someone is doing work. No kittens are killed if work is duplicated; it even keeps the kittens of deserving designers and coders in kitten chow. Fixing problems in the GNOME 2 UI is great for users. And certainly the work that has been done on the Ubuntu UI is one of many sources of inspiration for the GNOME 3 design.

But unlike maglev trains, GNOME 3 will be out next year. And at that point, very few of the patches that have been come up with for Ayatana will apply to GNOME. Not only that, but in terms of user interface, arbitrary choices are being made that don't match up. There was a huge community flap because the titlebar buttons were moved in Ubuntu from the right to the left. On the other hand, in GNOME 3 we cleared out the left side of the titlebar entirely as not to interfere with the primary task-switching navigation target at the top-left of the screen. Neither decision is wrong in its context. But it seems like a puzzler for Ubuntu once they switch to GNOME 3. Do they move the buttons back? Do they heavily patch GNOME 3 to match their current interface?

Design is just like code - the more changes you make downstream instead of collaborating upstream first, the the more problems you have when upstream changes. And the longer you carry big changes, the worse the problem gets.

Iterative development/continuous improvement

Posted Aug 10, 2010 10:00 UTC (Tue) by gidoca (subscriber, #62438) [Link] (1 responses)

Something's terribly wrong with the design of GNOME if they have to "heavily patch GNOME 3" only to move the buttons to the other side of the title bar.

Iterative development/continuous improvement

Posted Aug 10, 2010 10:38 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

You skipped over important parts of the comment you are replying to. It isn't just buttons that is being moved. There is a lot of design changes being applied downstream and a number of applets that enable the change that is going to be incompatible with the path that GNOME is moving towards.

Iterative development/continuous improvement

Posted Aug 10, 2010 10:47 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

But unlike maglev trains, GNOME 3 will be out next year

Contrary to your implied point, maglevs have been out for a while.

Contrary to the grandparent's implied point, maglevs aren't intended to replace regular trains for the most part: they're something different. GNOME 3 is, however, intended to (fairly rapidly) replace GNOME 2. Therefore -- even if it won't be released until next year -- it is very much in Ubuntu's interest to keep an eye on it and not diverge too much.