Re: Fully winding down my involvement in GTK+

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 12:32 AM, Michael Torrie <torriem gmail com> wrote:
> On 07/19/2012 06:54 AM, Kristian Rietveld wrote:
>> Also, I struggle to identify with the community these days -- that
>> is, I do not agree how GTK+ is being developed. Discussions appear to
>> mainly happen on IRC, which I can impossibly follow, contrary to on
>> the mailing list;
>
> Now that you mention this, I have noticed practically no traffic on any
> of the devel lists in the last few years.  I am probably not alone in
> thinking GTK development had stalled (though GTK 3 is obvious evidence
> to the contrary!).  Does not give a good message to potential GTK users
> who want to check things out.  The non-devel lists do have a fair amount
> of traffic, but it is now somewhat rare to have core GTK developers
> participate like they used to in the old days.
>
> I agree heartily that the mailing list is a much better place for
> tracking development.  IRC is too instantaneous (time zones preclude
> participation often), and IRC logs are extremely tedious and difficult
> to follow as they lack the structure that e-mail has.
>
> As a lurker who would like to follow gtk development, if the developers
> would return to the list I think it would be of great benefit to
> potential contributors like me (though maybe the potential is too small
> to even consider).  Certainly as long as GTK development discussions
> primarily take place on IRC I will be unable to follow and even consider
> contributing in any way, even a tiny way.

I can see the perspective that one might have as a user or as a
potential tentative contributor.

>From a developer stand point, and I think I see where Kris is going
with his statements, I think that if we're going to stop using the mailing
list and discussing changes of relative or greater impact to the software,
then as a contributor, it feels like a flat out waste of time to contribute
to that project on your own free time and dollar.

Usually a contributor will have sporadic moments in which they can
contribute significant portions of GTK+, we all have our areas of
knowledge and our reasoning of why we implemented things the
way that we did.

When some poeple go ahead and start making serious changes
at a rapid rate without consulting the mailing list, with only some
IRC quick discussions... well... dont expect that it's up to Kris
to go sifting through the IRC logs and find the day that someone broke
the treeview code... and don't expect me to automatically know
when the size request caching logic gets broken because someone
wants CSS to be ideal and perfect and is willing to queue resizes
on every random widget in order to get there.

However, we ALL read the mailing list. If you bring up your proposal
on gtk-devel-list about how you intended to do something that
might implicitly break GtkTreeView code, well up until now we would
always have Kris to notice that.. and guide us better wrt code that
he knows better.

Honestly though, we shouldn't let ourselves run unchecked like
this for too long, it was GTK+3.0 that was released, yes it has not
reached a level of stability what we've come to expect from GTK+ 2.0

Yes that allows us to brake more things between releases, and
yes that's generally a good thing while GTK+ 3.0 is a young
new API ... and I think it's entirely fair to say that developers
have been bleeding to deliver something cool for a new GTK+ 3.0
API... and that discussing everything in the normal manner would
have slowed things down.

Sigh, and on a not-so-completely-off-topic... I also miss how
we used to have module proposal on d-d-l...

-Tristan