tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/30/1822237&from=rss
heated, emotional, and very interesting debate over a controversial new feature: As of version 24, the ability to manually resize the text input area has been removed; instead, it automatically resizes depending on how much is typed. It turns out that this feature, along with the uncompromising unwillingness of the developers to provide an option to turn it off, annoys the bejesus of very many users.
One comment made by a Professor that teaches "Collaboration in an Open Source World" argued that 'It's easy to see why open source developers could develop dogmas.
Homepage But if the software isn't written for the users, what is it written for? If it is just written purely for the author's use, then don't bother creating a community. By creating a community with feedback and interaction with the user base, the project is no longer "write a gaim replacement" it has morphed into "create a piece of software for my community." im with its forums and a promise of support and development.
grumbel (592662) I think the main reason to not make it an option is because it is such a tiny obscure detail that you wouldn't even think to look for an option in the first place. And thus adding the option to the GUI would be useless clutter.
I have never seen another application do what pidgin now does. In general, that doesn't necessarily make it the wrong thing to do but in this case I think it does.
Journal I have never seen another application do what pidgin now does. I hate it so much I stopped using the "official" Google Talk client and switched to Pidgin.
And thus adding the option to the GUI would be useless clutter. Yet the developers refuse to add a "resize input area" plugin to the list of default plugins (despite the demand) for fear of cluttering up the plugin area.
arodland (127775) And sometimes things have to be options. Look, clearly there's a class of users that finds the resizing feature to be useful -- which is why it was requested and added.
I mean, sure, forking a project means that we now have fewer developers concentrating on a product than before, but it's for the best because now we'll have two IM clients that are nearly identical except for some minor things. More options aren't always better - more good options are better, more options for the sake of having more options or because you can't learn to play nicely with the other kids are stupid.
Journal I'd take this fork as an extreme example of the Open Source world "growing the fuck up," as you put it. The original developers choose not to fulfill a need of their user base, so a new crowd with the wherewithal to do it decides to work on achieving that rather than exchanging flames with the old guard. If the kid with the ball doesn't want to play fair, you either cry about it, or get your own ball and play like reasonable people.
Journal If the kid with the ball doesn't want to play fair, you either cry about it, or get your own ball and play like reasonable people. Thankfully, open source has lots of balls, and you can always clone someone else's balls and use them if you don't like the way that someone is playing with their balls.
Too many people who think they know better than the end-users, and too much work being done by lots of people on different, competing projects. You need to unite your efforts, not work against each others. This fork is just another proof (and WTH is with that "premier multi-protocol instant messaging client" remark? The whole KDE vs Gnome debate is one of the things that keeps Windows on PCs.
Score:3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward On the contrary ... with OSS you have at least the possibility to fork if a project does (no longer) deliver what is useful and wanted by its user base.
Journal All too often on software projects, I see someone spend several days figuring out a neat thing to implement that they personally think is a great addition. They may even realize that they were wrong thinking everyone would love it. But they just don't want to give up that code that cost them so much time to figure out and write. Coding for several days only to realize that you need to throw everything you wrote away is one of the hardest skills for a developer to learn ...
athloi (1075845) A writing professor once called this "murdering your darlings," in the context of writing fiction. You develop a scene with blood, sweat and tears, and then realize it's baggage and there's a better way, and shorter/more compact is always better.
hercubus (755805) How about asking actual users before starting to code anything? Or at the very least, fellow programmers who work on the same project? when i want an actual user's opinion, i'll beat it out of him come on, every developer's thunk it at least once...
Do I find it ridiculous that developers are ignoring a sizable portion of their userbase and implementing a feature that many people would like to disable? Do I find it ridiculous that it's causing a project to fork? This is supposed to be the one of the greatest advantages of open source; if you don't like the way people play, you can pick up the pieces and start your own game. Silly me, I had secretly hoped that the threat of something like this happening would keep software like pidgin from ignoring its user base.
Journal This wouldn't be the first time the pidgeon folk have decided to change the interface and refused to let people keep things the way they liked. Forks have been threatened before over their decision to hide protocol icons as well. I'm glad they separated the gui from the rest of the program - both this and the protocol icon decision really bug me.
On the one hand it "wastes effort" and can duplicate work. On the other hand, it can give the user community (which isn't homogeneous) the product they want. Often the end result will be better than if no fork had occurred. Another example is the Compiz/Beryl fork, which created some duplication for awhile, but ultimately turned out for the best since the merged Compiz Fusion includes the best features from both (a stable core and all the whiz-bang features users wanted, in the form of plugins). If both the Pidgin and Funpidgin developers work to provide something that their respective users find worthwhile, then what's the problem?
If I ever had the time to, I'd like to write a new UI for libpurple, Pidgin's backend. I have some ideas - but not enough time to actually learn how to use libpurple.
The gaim/pidgin developers have had a bad history of 'God complex'. Hell, just recently they refused to make any changes to the way Pidgin handles SASL authentication to XMPP servers due to a change in the 24 codebase that completely breaks SSL encryption to the OpenFire XMPP server, whereas the 23 codebase AND every other XMPP client seems to not have any issues. This ultimately leaves me with 2 options: either don't upgrade past version 23 of Pidgin, or use another client. And yes, not being able to resize the input text box drives me absolutely crazy. I look forward to a forked version addressing this and the XMPP SASL authentication issues.
shutdown -p now (807394) Can you please tell me why you hate not being able to resize the input box. I use iChat and I love the fact that is expands as I need it.
Journal Does anyone besides me find this utterly ridiculous? It's a feature that I personally don't think I'd care much about, but this sounds exactly like how the gaim/Pidgin developers are. My past experience has been that the people who develop gaim/Pidgin have always seemed to have a disdain for users other than themselves. They've been quick to dismiss any sort of criticism or suggestions for improvements to make the product better. Instead, they poopoo all of that behind the "we make this for ourselves and don't care if anyone else uses it" mantra.
Every option means doubling the number of possible configurations - which makes proper testing of the application twice as hard. It also provides twice as many weird ways that the developers can have their apps configured that will prevent them from noticing issues as they personally develop. There are some applications and configuration options where this isn't true ...
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