design and communication issues [was Re: How do we change fonts now]

[Adam Williamson]

On Sun, 2011-02-27 at 22:09 -0600, Jason D. Clinton wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 21:46, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com>
> wrote:
>         Why would you assume that all Red Hat employees should have
>         the same
>         positions? There's thousands of us, and no particular 'company
>         line' on
>         this.
> 
> Not all, and it's not about any particular opinion. The dearth of
> information among some of you, not all of you, is the problem. In your
> specific case, it would be really helpful if you would at least /join
> #gnome-shell and #gnome-design so that you can answer some of the
> stuff that comes up on the -test list from an informed position.

I can hardly be expected to follow the IRC channel for every downstream
project that ships in Fedora. I'm in too many and don't have time to
read all of them already. Adding more isn't going to help.

> We're trying really hard to stay on message and keep people in the
> wider community informed and then I see threads like this
> <http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-February/097081.html> where a Red Hat employee *paid* to work on the desktop somehow manages to throw factually inaccurate gasoline on an already burning fire. It's really disheartening.

> I actually banged my head on my desk when you did that.

I did ask you to correct me if I was wrong...but I'm not sure I was.
That's the way I remember it being presented during the Test Day...and
there's still no reboot option in GNOME 3 as of right now.

You may have banged your head on the desk, but you don't appear to have
actually replied and provided correct information, whatever that may be;
I don't see a single post from you in that thread. I don't actually see
a post from anyone on the desktop or GNOME teams.

It's also not easy to find the correct information. People who have
issues with GNOME 3 design are generally referred to gnome3.org, or the
FAQ at http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/FAQ , or the design
whiteboards at http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Whiteboards ;
I've been looking through all this stuff for ten minutes and I can't
find anything that accurately reflects the current actual status of the
shutdown/restart/suspend design. The document on this -
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Whiteboards/SystemStopRestart -
refers explicitly to a 'Restart' option which does not exist in my
up-to-date F15 system. So what *is* the party line here, anyway?

I'm not paid to work on the desktop, by the way. I'm paid to test stuff,
or rather, to facilitate community testing of stuff. As far as that
goes, I will work professionally to ensure that we do as much as we can
to test that GNOME 3 does what it's designed to do. But *personally*,
I'm just a GNOME user - a longstanding GNOME user - who is, like many
other GNOME users, rather frustrated by a lot of the design choices made
in GNOME 3, which seem to target a potential audience whose chances of
materializing are at best dubious, in preference to the audience of
real, existing GNOME users. I perfectly understand the different
possible positions on this, but I assert my right to represent mine. I'm
raising my personal issues here, I'm not representing Red Hat or Fedora
QA.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net