[Sugar-devel] Layout with gtk3

[Daniel Narvaez]

On 21 November 2013 13:03, Gonzalo Odiard <gonzalo at laptop.org> wrote:


> On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 8:58 AM, Daniel Narvaez <dwnarvaez at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Sigh.
>>
>> It's promoted by the gtk developers in their documentation, not by me.
>> It's designed as a replacement for all the other layout containers. I'm
>> forwarding their recommendation.
>>
>> Also I've been trying it myself before suggesting it in a speficic case,
>> as I did for your patch.
>>
>> Gonzalo, please can you try to be a little more friendly to people
>> contributions? You are not going to discourage me, but this kind of
>> attitude puts off contributors and that's the last thing we need. Thanks.
>>
>>
> Is not my intention to be not friendly.
> I will try to do better, but please, do not read my comment as bad
> attitude.
> I do not read your patch corrections as you have bad attitude with my work.
>


I know it's not your intention, I'm not taking it personally. But I think
you are often being dismissive and that hurts our effort to build a strong
community.

You didn't post a correction to my suggestion. I would have taken a "Are
you insane Gtk.Grid sucks because..." well. I love to be corrected.

Let me summarize what happened:

* You posted a patch. It was suboptimal because it created 3 boxes to
layout 2 widgets.
* I knew gtk3 had a better way to do this kind of stuff but I never played
with it. So I spent an hour understanding how it worked and wrote you an
example of how to rework your code to use it.
* I noticed our code is basically doing gtk2 layout using gtk3 (in new
code), which is bad both for code clarity and performance. So I thought it
would be good to let everyone know about the new cool stuff in gtk3 and
what gtk developers recommends.

Instead of commenting on the technical merit of the proposal, you dismissed
it. You said *I* should *prove* it's a good idea before recommending it.
That way you showed no interest in the idea I posted, only fear that it
might hurt. Can we agree that's a dismissive attitude? Do you expect people
will get involved if you show no interest of working *with* them? Notice
how this is exactly the same thing that got Sebastian mad couple of days
ago...

And here you have not just been dismissive, you are also plain wrong. If
the developers of the toolkit we use suggest something in their
documentation, I don't think I need to prove they are right. *You* need to
prove they are wrong about their own toolkit.

To answer your irc question. Having been in your situation myself, I don't
think this is matter of communication skills (not mainly at least, we know
language gets in the way a lot). It's more of an overworked maintainer
mindset... Contributions that doesn't help your immediate goals naturally
feels more like a treat than a gift. But it's chicken and egg, you are
going to be overworked until we have a strong community around this project
and we are not going to have one until we dismiss contributions.

We have an history of being overworked and of being dismissive (like many
other free software projects). We need to learn from that history.
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