[libreoffice-design] Re:[libreoffice-design] General relationship between coders and designers

Hi Sébastien, all,

Sébastien wrote:
> Le Wed, 09 Mar 2011 22:11:19 +0100,
> Bernhard Dippold <bernhard@familie-dippold.at> a écrit :
>
> > Hi Michael, all,
>
> Hi,
>
> Reply inline :-) (don't fear scrolling even if you do not see any
> answer for some time)

I'll remove the parts I don't reply to ...
> > At first I want to thank Sébastien not only for his work, but also
> > for being open to the discussion here, even if this means to delay
> > the final inclusion of his patch.
>
> I don't care about the delay of inclusion (the only fear I have is my
> hard drive failing with hours of non pushed work :-) ). Discussion is a
> good thing and I hope it won't be broken because of misunderstandings.

+1
> > [...]
> >
> > *Short version:*
> > If Michael (as one of the most relevant developer in our community)
> > is right with attitude against non-coding contributors and if this is
> > the official position of the LibreOffice project and The Document 
> > Foundation, I will not keep on spending my spare time and dedication
> > to this open source project any more.
>
> Again, I don't think that Michael wanted to hurt anyone's feeling. 
He probably doesn't do this on purpose, but there are two important points
that need consideration:

1. He is one of the main developers in LibreOffice, part of the SC. So his 
opinion has more weight in our community than posting by most of the 
other developers.

2. He repeatedly suggests to include the patch irrespective to the result 
of our discussion - and to leave this topic afterwards, so any proposed
modification will not be implemented if you would follow his suggestion.

I still hope that this is *not* the official position of the Steering Committee
and the LibreOffice community.

> > When coders are allowed and encouraged to do their changes regardless
> > of the voting of the relevant experts in areas their code
> > contribution touches, we come back to a two-class community where the
> > broader community is not involved in decisions taken by non-experts
> > but influencing the entire community and it's public standing.
>
> Thing is, the original bug report provided a 4 borders mockup, I
> quickly implemented it (minus some display glitches that were not
> fixed, they're present in stable LO version but are not this visible
> since the shadow is thin and opaque), and when I show it to some people
> everybody was suprised that the shadow was on 4 borders (the 5 people
> who saw the screenshot told me that there should be only 2 borders).
> Here this is my fault, I didn't knew that the design team had a mailing
> list (which seem to take 8 hours to deliver mails into my inbox), if I
> had, I would have posted the screenshot here to get more feedback. I
> apologize for that and didn't thought it would go that far.
It's not your fault at all.

Without Michaels recommendations this topic would have stayed as minor
as it should be. 

But I think it shows quite well what can happen, if  we don't work together on
topics relevant to more LibreOffice teams than just the developers.

We need to establish a workflow that allows easy coding as well as early 
inclusion of other teams relevant it this specific case.

But at first I have to know about the overall relationship between developers 
and non-coders. 

In OpenOffice.org the ESC decided to modify the MimeType
icons towards the colorless ODF icons. They didn't include UX and Marketing, 
blocked alternative proposals and caused lots of work leading to nothing.
I know that part of the problem has been based on Sun/Oracle vs. volunteer 
community, but the other part is about non-coders' dependency on developer
to get their ideas implemented or to have their expert concerns respected.

I'm sorry that this topic changed to one of the most general questions in a 
community including developers and other community members.

I should have started a new thread to make it clear, that your patch has just 
been the trigger, not the reason for my complaint.

> > I will no longer be part of such a community.
>
> As I said to Nick, I hope that my apologies will make you change your
> mind. I have very bad taste regarding design (as a vast majority of
> developers), so I fully trust design team opinion when it's given.

You don't need to apology for anything! 

If your opinion would have been shared by Michael, I'd never had written
such a mail.

[.... skipping more comments I totally agree with ...]

Thanks for your patience and positive attitude towards other parts of the
community. 

I still hope that this is the way we all can work together on topics important
to more than one single group or team.

Best regards

Bernhard




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