Coder's Log

What makes for a good maintainer? Although I do not know of a definite answer to this important but vague and controversial  question, maintaining various free software projects over the last many years, I've been learning some lessons on how to strive to be a good maintainer; some self-taught through experience, some from my colleagues (especially our awesome GNOME designers) and some from my GSoC students. I wanted to share these lessons with everyone so I arranged a small BoF at GUADEC and thought it would be nice to share it on planet GNOME as well. Some points only apply to UIs here, some only to libraries (or D-Bus service or anything with a public API really) and some to any kind of project. Here goes: Only accept use cases There are no valid feature requests without a proper use case behind them. What's a proper use case you ask? In my opinion, it's based on what the user needs, rather than what they desire or think they need. "I want a button X tha

Thanks to Ross and Richard Purdie, GUPnP moved to Git today. I already updated the jhbuild modulesets to reflect the new repos.

I will spit my vodka in your eyes if all you come up with is speed WTF? If you can't compete on a very important (to me at least) point, you don't want to listen? Git (especially if you use git protocol) is so fast because they first sorted out the basics and design right and then worked on the UI. Git is not just faster but tons of magnitude faster than bizaar. I used to think that 'speed' is irrelevant in this context but when I started to use Git, I realized how important it is for me as a developer. Also the stories of learning curve of Git are extremely over-exaggerated. For example, i recommended Git to a darcs user (who was pissed at darcs taking hours do clone a repo) and after three hours he came to thank me for that. I was surprised to see how quickly he learnt it but then realized that if you just give a bit of information how it's different than other VCSs out there before a newbie actually starts to learn/try it, he/she finds his way very easily into