A cou­ple days ago, search­ing for some­thing cool to hack on, I came back to leaf­tag. Shortly after I started updat­ing the deskbar han­dler, Luis Villa posted on his desire for it, and a release got cut. It’s pretty incom­plete and buggy, and not very use­ful right now, but still enough to get a num­ber of peo­ple excited.

How­ever, it’s also enough for peo­ple to start giv­ing us their opin­ions. I really don’t know why, but for some rea­son there’s a large group of peo­ple who really want us to use extended attrib­utes to store the tags. Even after giv­ing them a bunch of rea­sons why it’s not use­ful for our pur­poses, they keep try­ing to tell us how to build our bike shed.

I don’t under­stand why xat­trs are such a big deal, and I don’t under­stand why every­one cares so much about how our imple­men­ta­tion works. They’re never going to touch the code, and as long as it does what they want, why should they care what’s under the hood? I’ve set to see one com­ment on Christian’s blog that asked for a fea­ture that required xat­trs with­out first say­ing we should use xat­trs. It really felt like all the fea­tures they listed were just attempts to jus­tify their posi­tion that xat­trs are the coolest thing since sliced cheese.

I’m start­ing to under­stand why Nov­ell kept Xgl’s devel­op­ment under wraps until things worked.

Maybe I’m only start­ing to see some­thing that has existed for years, but it really feels like gnome is so encum­bered by end­less talk, bike shed­ding and stop energy that very lit­tle is hap­pen­ing. The cool things like gim­mie, deskbar, nau­tilus search and leaf­tag only hap­pen when some­one goes off in a cor­ner, shuts them­selves out from the com­mu­nity for a while and actu­ally writes some code. The mail­ing lists and irc chan­nels were recently aflurry with con­ver­sa­tion about what “com­mu­nity devel­op­ment” means, and just as quickly as it came, it was gone. A huge amount of time and effort was invested into that dis­cus­sion, and absolutely noth­ing came of it. This isn’t an unusual pattern.

I’ve heard it sug­gested by a cou­ple peo­ple that gnome needs a dic­ta­tor, and I really think that’s the case. At the very least, gnome needs some­one who can tell peo­ple to shut up and get back to work.

And for all you xattr fan­boys, code speaks a lot louder than words. Show us that xat­trs pro­vide some­thing use­ful and good, and we’ll talk. Until then, shut up and get back to work.

I’m usu­ally not one for movie quo­ta­tions, but I’m con­sid­er­ing adopt­ing one as my mantra. “Fuck the bozos!”

Tags: gnome, leaftag, rant, software