this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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user: "YOU MUST IMPLEMENT XYZ!!!! IT'S ESSENTIAL FOR MY USECASE"
answer: "Thanks for your feed back. We accept pull requests. "
and the user was never heard from again.
Until later on a random blogpost happens about "why FOSS is dying" or "why FOSS developers are rude" and you get namedropped :D
or you can be gnome, and "accept pull requests" by letting them stall for 8 years for no reason, refuse to elaborate, then claim your getting bullied when users get upset. that's a solid third option
I'm guessing you're talking about something specific and if so could you link the pull requests or repository?
There's actually a few of them, but the most recent I can remember off the top of my head is probably the DRM leasing. That was a fun one. Everyone got together discussed how to do DRM leasing, gnome agreed and signed off on the implementation, stayed quiet for a long time, someone made a pull request for the agreed upon implementation, silence for a bit, and then all of a sudden "actually this implementation bad should be portal so nvm not doing it this way everyone else should change to use portals"
ah right another was variable refresh https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1154 basically sat for 3 years with no review, and when users started being like hey we really need this what's going on developers got all super defensive and ultimately locked it claiming harassment
The comment about 8 years was a reference to the thumbnails in the file browser. If I recall correctly that one took about 8 years
I do recall the thread linked and I think a few individuals whose sole purpose on the Gnome GitLab was insulting the Gnome maintainers were banned. Sometimes Gnome's obsession with polish can be a double edged sword. I don't think anyone on the Gnome team let's merge requests die on purpose its just a lack of communication from them. Wish Gnome would take some risks with the DE with new features in the future.
What do you mean giving back to the community? We already report a use case!!
Honestly, the biggest issue for me is that it's someone else's code that is usually not following industry standards of maintaining something. Usually, it goes off in some open-source standard way of doing something. If more projects were better at standardizing toward the known industry standards then it'd be far easier for me to jump into.
Where "Industry standard" is EBCDIC? ASN.1?
Now don't get me wrong ASN.1 is actually kinda nice but if the industry wants FLOSS to adopt it it better produce some actual, comprehensive, FLOSS libraries that make working with it easy. In other instances they shout "noone supports our standards", while simultaneously locking those standards behind $10000 fees to even view. Or they invent brand-new ways to do things just for the heck of it and refuse to be compatible with every other manufacturer out there, see e.g. the NVidia kms/gbm saga. "Yeah we know we're writing a linux driver but let's just ignore how every other linux graphics driver interacts with its environment". Hardware companies trying to productise software leads to some atrocious insanity.
But which industry standard?