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

Mon Feb 20 13:30:48 CET 2012

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
+
+