Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by not_knuth 1980 days ago
I was only referring to the fact that Gnome developers get such a bad rap for being unfriendly, as the GGP stated.

The link was an interesting read eitherway and I can absolutely understand where the frustration comes from. The users' comments just flew over the developers' heads. Nonetheless it looks more like a breakdown in communication than willfully ignoring with deceitful intentions on the part of the developers in my opinion.

1 comments

There are a lot of issues like that. After a certain point a pattern emerges. I don't have time to find a big list of historical issues. Here are some quick links though.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/839

Look at why LXDE switched from GTK to QT.

Take a look at when a bunch of Gnome developers decided theming wasn't okay (as opposed to fixing themes): https://stopthemingmy.app/

Take a look at this bug-request on the transmission torrent client: https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685

> I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately.

Take a look at the whole history of client-side decorators, particularly the suggestion that every SDL-based app should implement their own CSD support: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217#note_3552...

There's plenty there if you just look around.

I said this in a sibling comment but, there are also plenty of examples of feature requests that were not rejected:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests?state...

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests?state=me...

If you're going to look at the pattern of historically rejected requests, please also consider looking at the pattern of requests that were accepted.

If you'd like, I can give you a more thorough explanation as to what is actually happening in any of those issues you've linked.

Almost none of those are feature requests. I mean yes, the gnome developers do write code, and that code does get merged in. I don't understand what you're trying to prove by pointing that out.

As you can see Gnome is mostly a redhat project these days: https://hpjansson.org/blag/2020/12/16/on-the-graying-of-gnom...

It's not surprising that things get merged when they come from redhat-affiliated developers.

The best way in any open source project to make sure a feature is implemented, is to write it yourself and submit a merge request. I don't think any open source desktop is special in this regard, the same rules apply. I am not sure what you're trying to point out by saying that some developers work for Red Hat, the same rules apply to them. If they want features implemented, they write the code and they submit it upstream. What else should happen here? Should they just stop submitting patches and let upstream stagnate?
>the same rules apply to them

I don't think so. Gnome seems like a bit of an old boys club. I think the post I linked backs that up.

How? The Red Hat developers have to follow the same review process as everyone else. If your argument is that contributors with more experience and clout are more likely to get their patches merged, how is that different from any other project? Does it really matter what company they work for? And should we be penalizing Red Hat just because they happened to be in the Linux business for a long time?