Dear developer community. I'm a bit disappointed by how the GNOME menu editing journey went.
In the very beginning, a menu editing API on top of the XDG menu spec was developed for GNOME, by Mark and Frederic, which was and still is a very clean and good API. I stepped up and implemented a C menu editor called gnome-menu-editor, entirely based on proposals Calum made [1] that were highly appreciated by the community. I invested lots of time into making it behave according to Calum's suggestions, it was really a fruitful task and we had a frequent exchange of thoughts and source code. It looked like we'd soon have a usable reference implementation. Suddently, shortly before the end of a development cycle, Mark came up with another menu editor [2], called gmenu-simple-editor, which was also based on Calum's proposal, but as far as I know Mark didn't really arrange detailed usability aspects with Calum. I wasn't sure why he came up with it, and supposed that he might have some different innovative ideas in mind, or maybe just preferred Python, but then again we could have used Alacarte as a base. Because Mark told me (in private) that my GUI wasn't simple enough, I shifted the advanced stuff into context menus. At some point the GUI exactly matched gmenu-simple-editor except for more features, which were only accessible through the context menu, shortcuts and DND, but now the UI didn't entirely match Calum's proposal anymore. >From the followup discussion to [2] ([3a], [3b]), it was very obvious that I were greedy for collaboration and exclusively interested in a great joined effort that would satisfy most of our users. I was even willing to blow my whole codebase away if it wouldn't match quality requirements. Make sure that you read these posts before presuming defamation. Unfortunately, time went by and I received no development feedback, just some user criticism, and no offers for collaboration. I got less and less enthusiastic, and not really integrated into platform/desktop development, although I tried to contribute as much as I could to gnome-menus improvements. gmenu-simple-editor was picked as GNOME menu editor, although it wasn't as feature-rich as gnome-menu-editor. Nevertheless, no discussion was raised at the ddl which menu editor should be picked, possibly because I failed to bring the issue up again - so it was also my fault, but maybe it should also have been brought up by other interested parties. I was very reluctant to initiate collaboration discussion again, because I made a blanket-check offer (read: [3a]), and it might have looked as if personal motives played a major role (i.e. pushing "my" implementation). gmenu-simple-editor still was exposed to many user rants. gnome-menu-editor was quite popular these days and is still on place 4 of the gnomefiles.org download statistics [4]. At this time I was quite pissed off and stopped gnome-menu-editor development, having spent many hours on it, and was very angry that my concerns were ignored. People had to install a gnome-* package, where something not included in the platform was installed, and a gmenu-* binary was shipped with a gnome-* package. Roughly at the same time, Travis Watkins wanted to have a feature-rich menu menu editor [5], totally not modelled after Calum's proposal. It was called smeg (and later renamed to alacarte), but more and more converged to Calum's ideas. It was and is a good piece of software, but it turned out to be the third implementation of the same concept with some minor tweaks. Short story: We had three implementations, and none was really perfect, until Alacarte became more mature and Calumistic (it's almost perfect now), and just became the default menu editor. But because there was no communication channel between the developing parties established, we just wasted many valuable hours. This (possibly one-sided) report shows us how collaboration does not work (lack of communication), and remind us that parallel development of core components with very similar targets in mind has to be watched carefully and as heavy redundance occurs, this should be brought up on the relevant development lists. I just want to make sure that something like this doesn't happen again, maybe for Alex Larsson's great ideas on the next generation of the GNOME VFS - so you may want to watch out for wasted efforts and point them out/bring them up as you encounter them. [1] http://www.gnome.org/~calum/usability/specs/menu-edit/ [2] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2005-April/msg00069.html [3a] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2005-April/msg00075.html [3b] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2005-April/msg00115.html [4] http://www.gnomefiles.org/app.php?soft_id=867 [5] http://www.realistanew.com/2005/03/18/gnome-menu-editor/ -- Christian Neumair <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
