[News.eclipse.foundation] Re: E4 / SWT 4.0

[Ed Merks <merks@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Lee Anne,

I totally agree.  Folks ought to be able to articulate their thinking.  
Just saying no because I'm an expert and my opinions are important isn't 
good enough.  As you can imagine, given a sufficiently large group, 
you're always going to end up with a few "characters" lacking in social 
graces.   Of course intelligent people will often disagree, but they'll 
be able to have a civil discussion about the finer points of the 
disagreement...

I'd ask for the specific case you mention, but I don't think it's so 
nice to drag someone through the mud in public.  Perhaps you'd like to 
share the specific scenario with Boris to understand what's going on.  
Treating the community with respect is important and if there are 
shortcomings, it's good to fix the concrete instances...


Lee Anne wrote:
> Boris Bokowski wrote:
> > (Then there is the possibility that someone is dogmatic for no good 
> > reason, but is extremely rare IMO.)
>
> It would help in understanding during discussion if someone who is 
> dogmatic would *state the reason* (good or otherwise) for why they are 
> vociferously holding their stance. :-)
>
> A long time ago, I was in a discussion with a committer about 
> something that a few of us thought was a perfectly reasonable request 
> for enhancement. In the Bugzilla discussion, no matter how I asked the 
> questions and tried to interpret his responses, I couldn't get a sense 
> of what was the underlying reason he thought he shouldn't entertain 
> the request in any release. It seemed as if some philosophy was in his 
> reason, but we came away with no more understanding of what the 
> philosophy was.
>
> Pragmatically, I recognize that a good reason is "not enough resources 
> for this request for this release", just as much as "that's not 
> backwards compatible and would break existing adopters". I do want to 
> learn what the underlying reasons are, so that I can learn and 
> contribute more intelligently.
>
> Best regards,
> Lee Anne