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by towolf 4783 days ago
There’s no gnome-terminal mailing list. Since "bike shedding" is struck down with regularity on the bug tracker I wrote the guy directly before he made the commits.

I asked why he wants to remove the feature. He said it’s loosely connected to other features that are buggy and he doesn’t see the point of the feature anyhow. Whether I had a justification for the feature to stay.

I replied and gave him two good reasons, one of personal merit, one of technical merit.

Then nothing else.

Then I discovered that it indeed had been removed, while I was following git snapshots. So I checked the NEWS and Changelog, ReleaseNotes and git. No mention. Could’ve been temporary or unintentional.

So I wrote the guy again to ask what’s up. No reply. Then he replied with a non-answer only pointing to a FAQ entry he made the same day with a distracting workaround.

So I checked out git locally to see where the code went.

It turned out among unrelated commits where the code was #if 0’ed out only to be removed a few commits later with "delete dead code" etc.

So I wrote him again to ask why he did this. No reply.

So I downgraded to the known-good old version and waited for release time. Same story repeats with other people. Apparently nothing personal because of my tone.

So. Conspiracy or justified puzzlement about this behaviour?

1 comments

So you felt entitled to publish the personal emails you had with him?
Olav, there were eight bugs filed and no explanation. I came back to the bugs irregularly to see wether there was anything new in terms of explanation.

Then this trainwreck happened and people were asking questions.

So I thought it worthwhile to add what I knew. I don’t think I disclosed anything personal. It was strictly technical matters relevant to the bug at hand.

So why did you ban me with a false accusation?

If anything the "removing type-ahead search from nautilus" bug should’ve taught the lesson that an information campaign works better than outright censorship.

When that bug got attention Jon McCann came in, explained, and then made a full blog post[1] to expound the directions they were taking. I still didn’t like it but I was satisfied with the explanation.

Stop digging in and realize that just slightly amending your policies and interactions with users would fix everything.

[1] http://blogs.gnome.org/mccann/2012/08/01/cross-cut/