FESCo Meeting Summary for 20090424

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Fri May 1 00:53:48 UTC 2009


On Fri, 2009-05-01 at 00:48 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> It's not about smart versus dumb. If we trust these people then we
> have 
> to assume that in most cases they *will* know better than people who 
> argue against them on mailing lists. And if we don't trust them then 
> there's something pretty fundamentally wrong with the way we're 
> producing this distribution.

I think the problem in this case is that they're considering the purity
of their system over the quality of the product of which it forms a
part.

The significant objection on the part of the desktop team is that it's
bad UI to have two volume controls as part of the desktop. i.e., they
have a policy that it's good UI to have one application per function,
this breaks that, therefore it's bad UI, therefore it's bad. There's a
perfectly good logic to their thought process.

The problem is it doesn't go far enough. It stops at "bad UI == bad",
but that isn't always true. I think everyone advocating this change
agrees that it's bad UI. It's never been presented as anything but a
stopgap measure. But the issue is that, in this case, the bad UI
produces a better *product*, in terms of an actual desktop operating
system which we are releasing very shortly.

The desktop team are thinking about their ongoing process of developing
a desktop, and from that point of view, suddenly throwing in a legacy
mixer application because they haven't quite finished twiddling the
problems out of the new one yet is nuts. Unfortunately, we're not
shipping an ongoing process of developing a desktop, we're shipping a
*point release of a desktop operating system*, with all the expectations
that are attached to that. Including the ability to perform really basic
configuration of sound devices from a graphical interface. if you look
at things from the context of the Fedora product, not from the
perspective of the GNOME design process, providing only the new
gnome-volume-control in Fedora 11 is a painfully obvious regression in
functionality.

This is clearly what our friends at Ubuntu think, given that quite late
in their release cycle, they dropped the new gnome-volume-control in
favour of gst-mixer *by default* (a much more invasive change than is
being proposed here). They made this change on March 3rd, 2009, and have
since shipped with it. I haven't seen any complaints about it.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net




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