Re: A question about procedure regarding a desktop environment policy

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Fri, 2004-02-20 at 00:46, Gregory Merchan wrote:
> What follows is a question about procedure.
[snip]
> So, again, the question:
> 
>   What is preventing GNOME form dropping sloppy focus support?
[snip]
 This is a fairly
>        straightfoward matter of finding out what it takes
>        to be rid of a bad policy.

Completely ignoring the specific issue, and assuming that something
needs to be changed:

I think a GEP is the closest thing we have to a policy or mechanism for
this. But I don't think we've had a GEP that has forced a maintainer to
do what they don't want to do, and a maintainer might not stick around
if we did. GNOME wouldn't have got this far if we had that kind of
structure.

Also, this is an old problem - We know that the future 99.9 million
GNOME users will use the defaults, and then we won't care about the 0.1
million who want something different. But at the moment that 0.1 million
is a bigger percentage of our user/developer base and we might not get
to 99.9 million users if we piss them off.
  
There are a lot of ways to annoy existing users, but metacity and GNOME
have still made good progress towards stuff just working, even when it
means removing some peoples' favourite thing. It seems like it must be a
gradual process.

In this instance, you might build a case by listing the specific
improvements that would be possible by dropping sloppy-focus, and making
them very easy to imagine. Then people could see some pros as well as
the cons. You'd have to be concise though.
 
-- 
Murray Cumming
www.murrayc.com
murrayc murrayc com