Re: IRC channels in gnome development

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi,

Shaun McCance wrote:
> Maintainers will inevitably have to say "no" sometimes. There are
> different ways of doing that. On the one extreme, you can just tell
> people they're stupid. On the other, you can carefully explain your
> reasoning each and every time. And there's a whole lot of gray in
> between.
> 
> A project like Gnome lives and dies by its community. We have to
> find the right gray level to keep people enthusiastic about what
> we're doing. Judging from recent history, I don't think we've
> found that.

Agreed. And one way to make saying "no" easier is to be able to point
people to conversations where decisions were made.

I'm not a fan of important stuff happening on IRC (even when it's
logged, to be frank, reading IRC logs to find useful information is
painful at the best of times).

I have previously discussed with a few people the idea of a publicly
archived mailing list with moderated membership for GNOME design (since
usability list was considered unusable for the purpose of productive
design work by several people I spoke to). A sufficient number of people
had a problem with the "moderated membership" part that the idea was a
non-starter, but I still like it & think it could work.

One piece of feedback I got at the time is "designers just don't use
mailing lists". I don't quite buy that, but perhaps people can rebut or
confirm here?

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org