UI Discussion

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Wed Oct 21 02:28:12 UTC 2009


On Tue, 2009-10-20 at 20:17 -0400, William Jon McCann wrote:
> Going to reply to this one only because it is convenient.  General
> response to the activity today.
> 
> I'm going to try to say pretty much exactly the same thing that Owen
> did... but in my way.
> 
> Here's the deal.  We see a bug - we fix a bug.  Often it is as simple
> as that.  Here's a fictional reconstruction of more or less what
> occurred with respect to the changes that have been discussed today.
> 
> Me: Matthias, I've finally had a chance to sit down and look closely
> at what we're doing in our default panel configuration.  Holy crap -
> it sucks.  We knew that of course.  And the Shell is going to fix some
> of these bugs.  But here are a few changes that I think we can make in
> the short term that make F12 look a bit more polished.  [I rattle off
> a few things]
> Matthias: Hey, those sound pretty reasonable.  And they shouldn't be
> hard to fix.
> [after not much time at all - in this case only a few hours I think]
> Matthias: Hey what do you think of this?  [has everything done]
> Me: Holy crap - you're a stud.  Looks much better!
> Matthias: Cool.  I'll email the Fedora desktop community and push out
> some packages.
> Me: You rock.

> the bar.  Could have occurred anywhere.  Did it make sense to poll the
> community first?  No.  This was a small change that in our opinion
> makes things better.  Does our opinion matter more than yours?  It
> may...   Why?  Because this is in essence still a meritocracy and we
> have trust relationships that may not be immediately evident to the
> casual observer.  Does that mean that we don't listen to anyone?
> Absolutely not.  Ideas some from many sources.  But at the end of the
> day someone has to sift through them and pick out the ones that shine.

I don't think anyone's debating any of the above. The important issues
that have been raised are different: basically that this was not
necessarily a good time in the release cycle to make these changes, as
they are not generally expected to happen post-Beta (though we do need
to make this more explicit), and it makes things tough on the
documentation front, as we are past the translation freeze for the
Release Notes, where this kind of change should be documented. Also that
it would be a good idea to *notify* (note: not poll) the community about
changes beforehand.

I understand that it's much less pain to be able to just make what seem
to you to be sensible changes in this kind of casual and _fast_ way no
matter where you are in the release cycle, but you're curating something
that's very important to probably millions of people: the layout of the
desktop they spend hours and hours a day interacting with. There's a
reasonable case for applying some sensible precautions to this. This is
not to say that all change is bad and should be opposed out of
principle, simply that it should happen at appropriate stages of the
cycle (and, as I've mentioned, other groups have work to do to make this
more clear) and with appropriate notification (which I'm more worried
about than discussion).

I'd also add the minor point that the tag request which was accepted to
get these changes into F12 did not explain the changes. That's not good.
The 2.28.0-5 tag request just says "contains a number of tweaks to our
default panel configuration that make the appearance of the panel more
pleasant", but doesn't explain what they are. It was obsoleted in favour
of the 2.28.0-6 tag request without anyone from releng actually reading
it, it seems, and the 2.28.0-6 tag request does not mention the padding
or 'desktop icon' changes at all.

https://fedorahosted.org/rel-eng/ticket/2488 - -5 tag request
https://fedorahosted.org/rel-eng/ticket/2501 - -6 tag request

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net




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