Hey John, I fully agree with your point of view about how fd.o projects should be.
I more or less used xdg-list to get a huge amount of opinions. I tried filtering some of them into a wiki page. I decided to go public with that wiki-page and let interested people add their needs. It turned out to be more or less a small success. The wiki-page did, indeed, grow. And most additions where not being added by idiots (unlike the flame wars on xdg-list). The idiots decided not to waste their time with it. Once done with that, I decided to shut up about it. And I started to search for people who are interested, I started a mailing list and etcetera. So just like you suggest.
I’d like to make sure, however, people understand that this wiki page isn’t “dconf”. It’s not. Not at all. It’s just the opinion of a lot people about desktop configuration management. So Colin, you’re blog-title is wrong! That image isn’t about “DConf”. It’s unjustified to use that drawing to taint peoples opinions about “dconf”. Please don’t.
DConf is a research project. It’s about “seeing what happens if you do this or that”. The exercise of telling people about a shared configuration management infrastructure is part of that research. Viewing our communities fail to agree on this stuff is a lesson that we are learning today. For me, it’s also part of the research: The results are miserable. I decided to stop that experiment.
I learned GNOME nor KDE are ready to cooperate on this level today. And it’s not only the cooperation between the two teams. I’m sure, John, you are learning how difficult it is with “D-BUS”. In my humble opinion shouldn’t cooperation be that difficult. So my plan is to keep this project a research one. I don’t think it’s a good idea to be very “public” about “dconf”. Yet you guys forced me to defend this ghost. I hope this illustrates why I wrote my previous reaction, and why I said “I don’t (yet) like doing that (blogging about dconf)”.
I hope the nonsense reactions (that I removed) from my blog and nonsense blogs and comments about “dconf” that suddenly pop-up on various places also illustrate why I think it’s better not to be very public about “dconf”. Some are really hilarious!