from Hacker News

Tobias Bernard Explains GNOME’s Power Structure

by calvin_ on 6/14/21, 1:41 PM with 7 comments

  • by broknbottle on 6/14/21, 6:24 PM

    > People new to the GNOME community often have a hard time understanding how we set goals, make decisions, assume responsibility, prioritize tasks, and so on. In short: They wonder where the power is.

    no they do not.. It's very clear where the power is when you open up an issue on the projects gitlab to report a bug or something that isn't working correctly and you receive a snarky response from somebody who's representing the gnome foundation project.

  • by kevincox on 6/14/21, 5:08 PM

    The main problem with a structure like this is that when individual project maintainers go AFK the project grinds to a halt without a clear way to start it back up.

    As a simple example gnome-characters is way behind on Unicode. Luckily there is a script to import the data dump, however it also should have some code updates to support things like skin tone. However different parts have been done with no maintainer response. It isn't clear where one can go to try to find a new maintainer or at least someone who can help manage changes for now until a new maintainer can be trusted.

    And it comes back to the question, what is the GNOME project if it is mostly a bunch of self-governed individual projects. Is GNOME just hosting infrastructure to make these projects possible? It is clear that it is more than just that.

    So I guess this grass-roots power structure is nice when everything is going well. But maybe a clear "executive" structure would be helpful for herding the individual projects from time to time.

  • by karmakaze on 6/14/21, 4:17 PM

    Was this structure different in the past? Or does it not apply to the selected desktop/shell for popular distributions?

    I'm specifically curious how with such a structure a thing like Gnome Unity could have happened? Was this the case with 'a developer' (Canonical) didn't follow the guidance of the Gnome Foundation/Design team, or something else?

    Similarly, how about the Gnome 2 -> 3 transition? That's not one that individual developers can mix-n-match. How is the future mainline decided in these sorts of cases?

  • by jbirer on 6/14/21, 8:47 PM

    GNOME people are lost in politics and constant power struggles, along with the hostility and snark that @broknbottle mentioned, making the project very unapproachable to new contributors and the curious.