Let's make another analogy. Say you were a child, and you were playing with blocks. You've helped the child next to you build a huge tower. The other child decides that part of the infrastructure isn't ideal. You ask them in what way and they tell you that it should be smaller and a different shape. You point out that it needs to be the same size in order to keep the tower up, and while changing the shape isn't a problem in itself it'll take some time to figure out exactly what the new shape should be. You suggest to the other child that maybe you'd be better off spending time on making the tower taller, but instead they decide to spend an hour coming up with a new support structure that ends up looking almost exactly like the old one. Who benefits?
Everyone should feel free to experiment with new ways of doing things, but it's appropriate to figure out why things are the way they are beforehand. If there are people with prior experience in the field, should they just let you make mistakes or should they point out that you're wasting your time? I don't object to the existence of LightDM. I object to it being described as lighter than gdm without any acceptance of it having a massively more limited feature set. I object to the suggestion that a distribution will directly benefit from the adoption of a more abstracted backend. I object to a decision being made without any obvious discussion of the real issues involved. I think Ubuntu will suffer because of this decision, and when Ubuntu suffers I think all of desktop Linux suffers.
Power management, mobile and firmware developer on Linux. Security developer at Aurora. Ex-biologist. mjg59 on Twitter. Content here should not be interpreted as the opinion of my employer. Also on Mastodon.
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Date: 2011-05-16 03:01 am (UTC)Everyone should feel free to experiment with new ways of doing things, but it's appropriate to figure out why things are the way they are beforehand. If there are people with prior experience in the field, should they just let you make mistakes or should they point out that you're wasting your time? I don't object to the existence of LightDM. I object to it being described as lighter than gdm without any acceptance of it having a massively more limited feature set. I object to the suggestion that a distribution will directly benefit from the adoption of a more abstracted backend. I object to a decision being made without any obvious discussion of the real issues involved. I think Ubuntu will suffer because of this decision, and when Ubuntu suffers I think all of desktop Linux suffers.