[Mageia-dev] Qt-based software unusable under XFCE since almost 2 days

[Michael Scherer]

Le dimanche 19 février 2012 à 12:19 +0000, Païou a écrit :
> Oliver Burger <oliver.bgr at ...> writes:
> 
> > I don't see the reason for this answer.
> > Michael is just trying to make sure, we don't have a unmaintained major DE.
> > Now, some maybe a bit harsh words on the developer mailing list - this 
> > is no user support list or forum or whatever - are far better, then 
> > having something like xfce unmaintained.
> > After all, what makes users run away: some not all that courteous mails 
> > on the -dev ml, whose existence they may or may not be aware of or a 
> > perhaps buggy, not updated, unmaintained desktop?
> > And if we keep a whole DE unmaintained in the repos, what does that say 
> > about overall package quality?
> > 
> > Oliver
> > 
> > 
> OK, you are right. Sorry.
> I wish ardently that Xfce remains maintained.

I guess lots of people do. But history shown this is not enough. 

Let's suppose we keep xfce, despites being unmaintained. When people
report bugs, they will have no or few answers. They will not like and
complain. Maybe more than with a maintainer, maybe they will not care.

When there will be bugs, no one will step to fix them. So people who try
this will either say "this DE is buggy", or "this distribution is
buggy". 
Then, likely sooner or later, someone will say "the DE work fine on
AnotherDistribution", so people will think "the distribution is buggy"
and switch to AnotherDistribution.

While the outcome look the same ( ie, people leaving because there is no
package, or leaving because it is not working ), in one case, they will
switch by thinking "the distribution is not having what I want, but the
rest was working" and will not badmouth us. In the other case, they will
think "the distribution is buggy", and complain.

So how ending like this would help us in the long run ? 

Maybe that's just me, but each time I mentioned "I am doing package for
Mandriva" in the past 5 years, people kept explaining me that they faced
some bug dating back to mandrake 7.0 time, and that they switched
distributions and how they now live in a world filled with pink pony
giving them candy, yadayadayada. Besides being demotivating for me
( cause my time travel machine is still not working ), this was hurting
the promotion of Mandriva.
 
Did someone ever heard "fedora is bad because they didn't ship Xfce at
the start". I never did, and I think everybody forgot it. I could surely
give several example on all distribution of missing packages and people
forgetting once the issue is fixed.

So people are likely quicker to forget lack of packages than lack of
quality.

And if we do not have the ressources to achieve quality packages, then
it is much more saner for us to choose the least damaging solution in
the long term, ie removing packages.

There was enough complains about Mandriva shipping buggy softwares, and
if as a community, we cannot increase work done to fix this ( we tried,
we even put 2 developers together to see if they mate and produce a 3rd
one to help us ), we do not have much others choice.

> For my part I participate in it as tester,
> where from my a little bit virulent reaction.
> 
> This place is also, I think, the only place where it is possible
> to have a dialogue with developers.
>  (except bugzilla, but bugzilla is more specific)

There is lots of place to have a dialogue, be it on irc, in real life
and so on. And if some of us ( and me the first ) do not go on forums on
a frequent basis, there is various reasons that were already explained
in the past
( http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.mandrake.cooker.devel/305365 ),
so I can only direct you to my previous answers as it is likely still
valid ( at least for me ).

-- 
Michael Scherer