Re: [Libreoffice] FW: [PATCH] Introduce HideDisabledMenuItems style setting

Hi Allen,

        I'm picking on you because you SHOUTED ;-) but there are plenty of
other problems in this thread, and my mail is fairly generic.

        Firstly - progress is not well served by hindering, and slowing down
people committing patches - yes, some things may break when things are
changed, but then - the fixes should be able to get in quickly too. I
was disappointed that the first developer response was not to get on
IRC, talk it through, and merge it, as I've now done.

        It is not the end of the world to have a temporary regression in a
tinderbox snapshot - we have ~six months to spot and fix it before many
end-users get it.

        It -is- the end of the world to de-motivate, and loose developers
contributing code; we need to presume contributor sanity until proven
otherwise, and merge unless we know it is certainly wrong. Otherwise we
will never get anywhere IMNSHO etc. Shouting about the potential loss
(though in fact it is not lost), of a minor feature, available only to
expert users and sysadmins, does not seem proportionate to me.

        Also, by delaying developers with lots of noise, quite apart from
de-motivating them, we waste opportunities for using their time for
other improvements to the user interface.

        So - in summary, there is huge danger of de-motivation, dis-couragement
and sterilization of the developer community from applying
indiscriminate push-back. -Particularly- if it is inexpert push-back. In
this case, it seems the distinction between a -context- menu and the
main menu, that is present if you read the patch (though somewhat
missing from the original mail, and the naming sadly) is quite
important.

        Ergo - I would love to end this thread for now; if a problem or
regression is found in a subsequent snapshot of master (for 3.6) - it
would be great to know about it at that stage, and of course testing
appreciated here. Since I just pushed the changes, hopefully (all else
being equal) we'll have those builds in a day or two.

        Anyhow - I am sure none of us intend to cause problems, delay
improvements, de-motivate developers or end up shouting :-) so -
hopefully we can get back to some positive work on the product.

        ATB,

                Michael.

-- 
 michael.meeks@novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot