Voting considered harmful (Was: Re: Echo Icon Theme in F10?)

Bill Nottingham notting at redhat.com
Tue Oct 14 16:54:33 UTC 2008


David Zeuthen (davidz at redhat.com) said: 
> Consider what happened if we started voting on what patches should go in
> tarballs? Or what the dialogs in your desktop looked like? Or what
> options to use by default. Or what IO scheduler to use in the kernel.

Obviously, that's silly. The default response to any disagreement shouldn't
be 'let's put it up for a vote!' If we can't solve conflicts in a better
manner, we have bigger problems.

> The fact that you are proposing a vote only shows there's a tremendous
> problem in Fedora. You guys hanging out on fedora-art-list that is
> interested in the visual of the desktop _really_ _really_ need to grow
> up and work with upstream projects instead of sitting in your own little
> Fedora cube disconnected from the rest of the world. With your stupid
> voting system.

There's no need to toss around 'grow up' and 'stupid'; we're all adults
(or close enough) here, and that's unlikely to bring people around to
your point of view. I think there's two main points:

- Icons are different than most of the other 'value add' that our groups
  do.
  
  For documentation, there isn't really any universal sort of upstream
  documentation that encompassess the entire distro, or installation,
  etc. So, our Docs group writes it, to give us a unified, consistent,
  piece of documentation. There's not really an upstream to push it
  to, so it remains Fedora-specific.
  
  For splash screens, etc., there (obvioulsy) isn't a central upstream
  location for Fedora-specific images. So our Art team does that. There's
  not really an upstream to push it to, so it remains Fedora-specific.
  (Non-branded backgrounds probably should be pushed to an upstream
  desktop-backgrounds module.)
  
  However, for icons, there already are upstream collections of icons
  for GNOME, and apps at large. They're fairly unified, and people
  who want changes should work with that upstream. A wholesale change
  to push a new style upstream probably wouldn't fly, so anything
  of that sort would have to remain a fork, or separate, forever.
  
Question:
  So, why are we, as a project, interested in working on a large set
  of never-to-be-upstreamed changes when there is an existing upstream?

- However, there's a precedent here. In Fedora, we ship as default,
  the Nodoka GTK+ and Metacity themes. This is a separate project,
  hosted on Fedora hosted, etc. There is, already, upstream GTK+
  themese. And (unless I missed something), it hasn't generated near
  the amount of controversy.

Question:
  Why is Nodoka 'ok', and Echo not, in people's opinion?

In any case, I doubt David speaks for the entirety of the Desktop SIG
as to their opinions of Echo. (Nor, do I suspect, does Martin speak
for the entirety of Fedora Art.) Given that things like Nodoka are
more or less OK by the consensus of both the Art team at large, and
the Desktop team at large... is there a reason both teams can't come
to a consensus about what to do with Echo?

(FWIW, when I voted on this at FESCo, I assumed that this consensus
was already there. My mistake.)

Bill




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