Jeff: I don’t think a “netapplet/NetworkManager debacle” characterization is accurate. Netapplet is a hack at best that more or less simply calls “ifup” and “ifdown” on interfaces. It’s 3700 lines of code. We never intended it to be a GNOME solution or even a cross-distribution one. That wasn’t because of any perceived value-add in it, it was because it was a stop-gap measure to fix the problem of switching between wired and wireless networks in SUSE, given tight restraints on development time. Judging from the response netapplet has received in retrospect from SUSE and NLD users, it was a pretty serious problem. Robert and I readily admit that NetworkManager is a more complete solution, and if you look at the list archives over the past 3 months Robert has arguably been the most active developer on NM.

Now, that’s not to say that I don’t agree generally that we should do as much development openly within the community as possible, but to believe that every line of code from every GNOME-affiliated company that happens to use GTK should be developed openly in public CVS as a perfect cross-platform solution with mailing lists and public discussion just isn’t realistic. Sometimes you have to make compromises. Sometimes you have to write throwaway code.

The lack of a GNOME design team is troublesome. The fact that Novell and Red Hat each have one, and that everyone in the community has their own ideas and that these groups are often at odds with each other in terms of approach or ideology is troubling. HCI and UI is such a subjective thing. It’s easy for developers to say “let’s do API/ABI compatibility” as a goal for the platform. It’s a lot harder to get everyone on the same page for unified user-facing behavior. I’m not sure how one reconciles this.