Just wanted to respond via the planet on one thing:
It is getting increasingly hard to get new stuff into Gnome, and when someone approaches with something that is slightly controversial huge flamewars erupt. Consider Tracker and Empathy on the desktop-devel list and the recent “incident” on the gtk-devel list.
Ignoring Tracker (too long ago and I’d rather see that standard used instead of deciding between Tracker/Beagle), I don’t think the other examples are good. For one, the gtk-devel list was not regarding getting new stuff into GNOME. Further, the flamewar started because the person was clearly trolling (I had to resort to moderating!). The idea itself did not cause the flamewar.
Empathy has a few issues (not using gnome-keyring and the license). This doesn’t support your statement. If those are fixed, I’d give a +1 during the r-t meeting. From the last time we discussed Empathy, I felt these two items was the only reason Empathy wasn’t accepted.
Every release cycle we accept a few things into GNOME. We do ask for a certain quality, e.g. making releases on time and responding to the incoming bugs. Sometimes a proposed module only made one release on time. We do look at future possibilities of a certain module (good enough and shows promise is what I look for), but the basics shouldn’t be ignored.
The intention of that paragraph was to illustrate what caused caused bad feelings in me, and what would make me consider not proposing or talking about fx. xesam-glib on any of those lists.
Ie. I am really not interested in the specifics of the cases, more in the way they have been executed.
I can see that that is not perfectly clear though.
I don’t understand why you ignore specifics. The release team is the one who makes the final decision. We try to follow the consensus of the discussion in d-d-l. The flamewar part doesn’t affect getting stuff into GNOME.
I think the point you wanted to make is that people troll too much in mailing lists and that that makes you hesitant to send something to d-d-l. This is not related to the previous part of your sentence: ‘it is getting increasingly hard to get new stuff into Gnome’ (hope that is clear now).
If you want less flamewars on d-d-l, raise the topic on foundation-list. I can and will moderate lists if either asked or when it gets out of hand. However, first the community must see the need and accept something is done about it (moderating without a clear request is something which I try to avoid – this as my views might differ from the community, by moderating I feel like I’m forcing my view on things). One thing I’d like to see is that people would not participate in flamewars , while still clearly objecting to unacceptable behaviour.
FWIW, I’d really like stuff like Empathy and Xesam to be part of GNOME. Please don’t be too affected by trolls.
“I think the point you wanted to make is that people troll too much in mailing lists and that that makes you hesitant to send something to d-d-l.” – Yes more or less.
However this _does_ make it increasingly hard to get stuff into Gnome. To me, at least, there is also a psychological barrier as well as a technical one.