On Sat, 2009-08-15 at 16:13 -0600, Dean Hilkewich wrote:
Bryen M Yunashko wrote:
Dean,
You are very much overexpecting and looking for answers too quickly.
First of all, Weekly news is written by the community. It is not some "official" publication from Novell. So, if you're upset that community didn't report anything on the debate, basically, you're upset with yourself because you are part of the same community that writes the Weekly News and you were free to submit an article if you felt it was relevant to the debate.
Never said it was put out by Novell, nor do I expect Novell to publish in the newsletter. I do however expect status updates on pressing issues from an official body.
Again, it has only been a short period of time since the debate started, and only a few days since the last relevant comment on any of the several threads. This is not the only item on people's plates and you're expecting a rush to drop everything else to put up a status report when really, there's nothing to report at this time. You made a direct accusation that people were hoping to sweep this under the rug by being silent, even though its only been a few days. That was an unreasonable expectation short and simple.
Second of all, let's look at the date here. It is August 15th, middle of the month. This debate started about two weeks ago (give or take a day or so.) Slow down, kid! Give the decision-makers a chance to digest what has been said on both sides of the debate and come up with a sane decision. I mean, seriously! 11.2 isn't coming out until November. The huge amount of mail pumped into the several threads on this subject have slowed many of us down in attempting to read what has been said.
Great update. Now would that have been so hard to put into the newsletter?
Yeah it would. Because what I have said is not an official update and there IS no status to update. The position remains the same as when Michael Loeffler, the decision-maker, put out an email on this list saying he would make a decision by mid-August (and looking at my calendar, it's still mid-August.) I did not offer up a status update. I merely stated what is obvious to everyone else in the message sent out by Michael. He and others are evaluating and will get back to us. That's all.
Third of all, a decision will be coming soon enough. I know it is being actively looked at. But baseless accusations such as "hoping that the issue will disappear" is precisely what slows down the decision-making process. This debate has had many good points made on both sides, but it has also been fraught with conjecture, wild assumptions, and baseless accusations that have detracted from the main issue itself. How you managed to interpret a debate that has only started 2 weeks ago into "shh, let's hope people forget about it" is beyond me and is a disservice to the very proposal that sparked this debate. This topic is foremost in many people's minds and NO ONE is attempting to avoid the issue.
I wouldn't say it's baseless as features are closed on openFATE all the time because they are deemed not important enough and there has been literally thousands of bugzilla report that have been put off into never neverland and never brought through to the next release. They are killed with reasons like "not enough time" or "too late in development cycle" instead of being brought forth to the next release.
That's an unfortunate circumstance. There are only limited resources and there are expectations made by all of us upon those resources. Time is not infinite, nor is manpower infinite. Would I like to see better explanations of why things are "WONTFIX"ed? You betcha. I think there needs to be a far better level of accountability by decision makers. I'm on your side on that one. But I also know that it isn't through a callous disregard but rather though an immense amount of juggling of time and functions by a rather small group of people. I also happen to know that we are not the only project out there stricken with this dilemma, as even larger projects out there are having bug reports ignored for extremely long periods of time with no explanation. The question is, how do we, as a community, step up to take up the slack where Novell's personnel leaves off? How do we become truly self-reliant and not totally dependent upon those resources? Those are not easy answers to solve because there aren't many of us in the community who have the time and skillset to do that. It's something I'd surely like to see addressed, but at this time, I don't see an immediate solution to that problem.
Dean
-- Bryen Yunashko openSUSE Board Member GNOME-A11y Team Member www.bryen.com (Personal Blog) www.planet-a11y.net (Feed aggregator of the Accessibility Community) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org