seeker5528
18-February-2007, 23:48
A blog post in response to the latest Linus/Gnome thing.
Managed to get myself embroiled in a little email exchange with Linus about configurability options and GNOME. Seesm that little exchange even managed to hit Slashdot. The misconception that I feel Linus have and a lot of the people posting on Slashdot is that patches that adds configuration options to GNOME would automatically get rejected. This is simply false.
Metacity was philosophically very different from Sawfish and Havoc was very strict about what he let into Metacity, due to an idea that requests for config options was usually a result of broken behaviour in the window manager and thus feeling the behaviour should be fixed instead of a config option added to work around the problem. This was in line with the policy that do govern GNOME as mentioned above, but in the case of Metacity this was applied in a much sterner/hardcore fashion that for most other modules. But due to Havoc's high profile in the community and beyond it I think the policy he kept for metacity colored how people outside the project perceivedthe project as a whole which is the main reason I see for this hard killed perception to live on.
Full blog entry (http://blogs.gnome.org/view/uraeus/2007/02/17/0)
Later, Seeker
Managed to get myself embroiled in a little email exchange with Linus about configurability options and GNOME. Seesm that little exchange even managed to hit Slashdot. The misconception that I feel Linus have and a lot of the people posting on Slashdot is that patches that adds configuration options to GNOME would automatically get rejected. This is simply false.
Metacity was philosophically very different from Sawfish and Havoc was very strict about what he let into Metacity, due to an idea that requests for config options was usually a result of broken behaviour in the window manager and thus feeling the behaviour should be fixed instead of a config option added to work around the problem. This was in line with the policy that do govern GNOME as mentioned above, but in the case of Metacity this was applied in a much sterner/hardcore fashion that for most other modules. But due to Havoc's high profile in the community and beyond it I think the policy he kept for metacity colored how people outside the project perceivedthe project as a whole which is the main reason I see for this hard killed perception to live on.
Full blog entry (http://blogs.gnome.org/view/uraeus/2007/02/17/0)
Later, Seeker