Re: Revitalizing the Urban Center of GNOME

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc redhat com>]

Hi Christian,

On Thu, 2005-02-17 at 13:56 +0100, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote:
> What would help the problem a lot is if debates go more into specific
> sublists instead of going onto desktop-devel. One of the main reasons
> for this is that for many sub-projects the relevant maintainers are not
> on the relevant lists. I find it kinda pathetic for instance that
> someone who proclaims himself Lord of the Theme is either not subscribed
> to or at least have never posted to the gnome-themes list, and through
> that is forcing theme discussions onto desktop-devel. Similar problems
> for other sub-projects, which together collate into desktop-devel
> getting flooded.

	That's a given, but I do find it understandable that when a list
becomes as dead as gnome-themes-list is, people naturally move away from
using it. Part of fixing the desktop-devel-list problem should involve
re-vitalising those other lists, but ...

> Maintainers actually being part of the subproject they pretend to
> maintain instead of screaming murder on 'global' lists would do more 
> for this problem I think than lots of 'shut up' messages sent to
> desktop-devel or gnome-hackers.

	... lets not kid ourselves - we don't want to just split up the volume
of mail amongst many lists, we want to solve the social problems that
make it difficult for hackers to have clear lines of communication.

	To give an analogy - if this was a BOF at GUADEC, we started talking
about themes and everyone started shouting their opinion, it wouldn't be
long before someone stood up an shut the thing down. That person
wouldn't tell everyone who wanted to talk about themes to go to another
room. He'd either gather the stakeholders together in the hallway and
have the discussion or make it very clear that people need to restrain
themselves.

	(Also, its not hard to see that its really Seth's "I am Lord of the
Theme" mail that you have a problem with here - better to just sort that
issue out than clouding this one.)

Cheers,
Mark.