FESCo Meeting Summary - 2009-03-06

Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler at chello.at
Sat Mar 7 00:59:00 UTC 2009


David Nielsen wrote:
> Which is why Empathy has a feature page, the very reason I went this
> route. Suggest an improvement, then see what would be said and maybe..
> just maybe have a meaningful technical debate on the merits of the
> proposal.

Empathy has a feature page driven by the GNOME desktop team. And by the way,
those desktop team folks decided Empathy was not ready as the default for
F10 and now F11 for usability reasons which are expected to improve later,
so in fact the "Empathy as default" feature was pushed back to F12, and the
Empathy maintainers were consulted and agreed with that decision. You can't
force a default app through without buy-in from the maintainers of the
affected spin(s).

Another big difference is that Empathy is now the official IM client in
upstream GNOME (maintained in GNOME SVN etc.) whereas Pidgin is and has
always been a third-party project, which is pretty different from Banshee's
and Rhythmbox's situation.

> I followed the feature proposal guide to the letter, additionalyl you are
> most welcome to go back and read. I never ignore the contraints of the
> live CD, it was always mentioned as a con, I even offered suggestions and
> the hours it needed to get them implemented. Hell when bugs where filed on
> issues, I and the other maintainer was on top of it and tried to get them
> resolved as quickly as possible. I might be many things but I am honest. I
> did this from a desire to improve Fedora.

The size problems are not necessarily fixable at all. As you rightly say,
Banshee will always be written in Mono, which drags in not only Mono
itself, but also many *-sharp bindings, especially considering the fact
that Banshee has a lot of features which require supporting libraries. So
it may well be that Banshee will never be suitable as a default on a live
CD. This is something you have to discuss with the maintainers of the GNOME
live CD, not FESCo.

> I have instead gotten disrespectful personal mail, the only feedback I
> have gotten when asking the SIG in question was in the same tones you just
> used, from the maintainer (and source of aformentioned nasty mail) of the
> product I proposed to replace. My proposal page was defaced in a more
> unprofessional manner (same guy).

Then you should have gotten the hint that your proposal is not a good idea.
Of course the Rhythmbox maintainer is biased, but he's also the one best
qualified in the multimedia area, so I'm not surprised the feedback you got
was from him.

> I tried to answer critics, I offered, and contacted upstream to ask them
> to help answer questions (to which they kindly agreed). when instead of a
> productive debate as was requested no such debate ever took place.

You created that feature page 2 weeks before feature freeze and it was
rushed to a vote in the last FESCo feature approval session, there was
simply no time for such a debate. Also keep in mind that developers are
busy completing their features for the freeze and the beta. This sort of
major changes needs to be proposed at the beginning of a release cycle.

        Kevin Kofler




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