[openbeos] Re: [ge-talk]Re: Re: Tracker icons

Helmar, your "GE-liquidationist" proposal and most of your arguments in support of it (below) seem wrongheaded to me, if indeed they are sincere and not merely sarcastic or provocative or curmudgeonly. (Let's hope that the latter is not the case; otherwise, I would be wasting my breath here.) Several of your points sound particularly odd to me.

> GE (AFAICC) is nothing but a talk shop.

An open discussion forum, or "talk shop" as you label it derisively, is a valuable thing in and of itself. From where I stand, GE appears to be enormously successful as a gathering place for people who enjoy contributing to the community by participating in a collective "visioneering" of features for possible inclusion in some future iteration of Haiku (whether R2 or R3 or R4 or R5 or Rx or...). The GE mailing list seems to be open, democratic, inclusive, and non-judgmental, which are precisely the characteristics that any successful "brainstorming" venue must possess.

> Nothing is being
> done that could/will be implemented into Haiku post R1.

It is impossible for anyone who is not a seer or fortune-teller to possess conclusive evidence in support of the truth of this forward-looking claim. This must be either hyperbole or provocation, neither of which has much of a place in civil, rational discourse.

> Lots of
> stuff is being bandied around, yet nothing is being decided on and
> moved up the ladder, eventually leading to execution (read: written
> code) and implementation/integration.

I think that it might be too soon to expect action on proposals advanced in GE. Currently, the Haiku project is -- rightly and with considerable discipline and focus -- concentrating its limited development resources on Haiku R1, using BeOS R5 as a touchstone and point of reference for features and system behavior. This willful refusal on the part of Haiku coders to succumb to distraction and the seductions of "feature-creep" is largely responsible for the remarkable progress that the project has made over the past several years. It will ensure a successful release of Haiku R1 in the not-too-distant future.

My own (conjectural) thinking is rather along these lines: Once R1 has been released and the Haiku project is in a position to begin committing resources to R2, active code contributors will collectively, and to the best of their abilities, work out a reasonable and respectful mechanism for evaluation and prioritization of additions or revisions to the feature set, many of which will very likely be hand-picked from the rich field of ideas that GE has cultivated for several years now.

> So... by the time R1 is out, GE is exactly where it was the day the
> list went live.

On the day that the list went live -- 5 February 2003 -- there were exactly seven test messages and greetings posted by Marius Soutier, Marton Fabo, Eckard Riedenklau, Alexander G. M. Smith, Bruno G. Albuquerque, Atilla Öztürk, and a fellow named, simply, Zack. Since that time, tens of thousands of messages have been posted to the list by hundreds of contributors from at least a dozen different countries around the world representing nearly every continent. Together, these messages constitute a repository of the ideas and dreams of a large number of intelligent, reflective, and creative souls -- not one of whom received a penny in compensation for their time -- regarding their dearest wishes for an ideal desktop computer operating system.

When you formulated your sentence above -- when you considered and chose your words, and typed them out, and reviewed them, and decided to send them off -- was it your intention to insult the efforts and intelligence of everyone who has contributed to this remarkable endeavor? Was it your intention to make yourself reviled? Or, perhaps worst of all, did none of these possible consequences ever enter your thoughts?

> I politely suggest the closing of the GE list. It just doesn't serve a
> purpose in its current incarnation, irrespective of the noble idea
> behind it when it was launched - unless people like expending their
> time on just talking about stuff without leading/going anywhere.

Again, unless you have privileged access to knowledge of the future that is not shared by any other human being, you are not in an epistemic position to make this claim with any degree of plausibility whatsoever. This is to say: you simply cannot know what the future will hold for all the hopeful imagination that the Glass Elevator project has inspired and collected in its archives.

Respectfully,

Czeslaw Czapla



Helmar Rudolph wrote: 
Simon Taylor wrote:


Simply putting any feature ideas suggested onto the R2 list has
actually made the feature-creep issue a lot worse than it might
be otherwise IMHO, and without a very firm hand on the tree
post-R1 I really fear what Haiku will grow in to.



Good point. GE (AFAICC) is nothing but a talk shop. Nothing is being
done that could/will be implemented into Haiku post R1. Lots of
stuff is being bandied around, yet nothing is being decided on and
moved up the ladder, eventually leading to execution (read: written
code) and implementation/integration.

So... by the time R1 is out, GE is exactly where it was the day the
list went live. That surely isn't in the interest of Haiku, the
community or people like Simon who get frustrated with the albatross
around the neck called "Glass Elevator". 

The constant referring to GE of new ideas or concepts that more
often than not don't seem to be overly complex/complicated isn't
only nauseating but counter-productive. But given the previous
responses to a request in change in attitude by those in command, I
politely suggest the closing of the GE list. It just doesn't serve a
purpose in its current incarnation, irrespective of the noble idea
behind it when it was launched - unless people like expending their
time on just talking about stuff without leading/going anywhere.

Helmar



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