On Wednesday 05 of August 2009, Michael Meeks wrote:
One of the things that most interests me about this debate is the excessive argumentation and extrapolation from whatever percentage of install-base, to the idea that we should substantially offend our growing Gnome community. Personally, I'm pretty annoyed by claims that openSUSE is, or should be a KDE focused distribution, whatever it's history - that at least is my bias.
Let me correct some factual errors you made: - Although there were proposals that openSUSE should focus on KDE, they appeared only very early in the discussion, and I don't think anybody now still seriously proposes any special advantages for KDE that no other openSUSE component would have. - I also do not remember anybody now suggesting to offend the GNOME community or treat them unfairly (at least not as a part of the proposal, ignore any trolling). - On the contrary, there have been presented reasons that the current situation is unfair and might be considered offensive by our KDE community.
Having said that - all this talk of "policy", and logic, reason, marketing and so on suggests to me that this decision is a highly charged, multi-disciplinary, nuanced - and *extremely* non-technical one. In fact, it is hard to discern any technical issue here at all - the code change in question is utterly trivial, even for my basic ycp skills :-)
I can explain to you the situation in very technical terms if you want: - when openSUSE ships several competing components, the most suitable, or, failing a clear solution for that, the most popular one is preselected - fact - the desktop selection is not handled the same way, since there is not a clear decision on the most suitable component, and the most preferred component is not preselected - fact - this creates an exception that is not present elsewhere - fact - this exception grants GNOME an advantage - fact - no other openSUSE component is granted such a(n obvious) advantage - fact - giving something an exception that gives it an advantage can be considered unfair by competing components (or even any other component) - fact - as such openSUSE grants one of its components an unfair exception - logical conclusion - openSUSE claims to be an open distribution where both KDE and GNOME are equally welcome - conflict with above Really, it's quite simple. If I still remembered it from the school, I could probably write this in predicate logic and feed to Prolog to prove it mathematically. And even if not, I think it's still quite clear for common sense. Do not see the 'KDE' and 'GNOME' there if it helps, think 'A' and 'B'.
Indeed, to me this looks like a simple conflict between three opposed view-points[1] "KDE default, no default, and GNOME default" - with apparently no substantial chance of compromise, and seemingly a lack of clarity around who is empowered to make the decision. Indeed - to me, it seems like we have the obvious compromise position selected already.
The current proposal is a compromise. It is however not what you say, but the view-points are "favour KDE, favour nobody, favour GNOME" and the suggested solution is "favour nobody, remove exceptions and special rights", i.e. the middle compromise. Please refer to my mail "openFATE feature #306967 , my KDE summary" for further details if something is not clear about that. -- Lubos Lunak KDE developer -------------------------------------------------------------- SUSE LINUX, s.r.o. e-mail: l.lunak@suse.cz , l.lunak@kde.org Lihovarska 1060/12 tel: +420 284 084 672 190 00 Prague 9 fax: +420 284 028 951 Czech Republic http://www.suse.cz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org