Philip my goal is not to discourage experimentation and wild ideas. My goal is to make sure people are focused and understand when it starts to become noise that they need to have strong leaders to reign it in or the project will ultimately fail and in the process end up wasting other people bandwidths. The worst part is a lot of these ideas are springing up and devolving into noise on XDG. Hell I ignore most of XDG these days unless someone points out something I should be looking at. Really these things need to be started on XDG and then moved somewhere else and finally proposed when there is working code and/or a sane spec.

The things that have worked out so far on Freedesktop have all had a couple of things in common - a strong leader or two, being applied to actual problem domains without care of who would adopt it, working code, and relative simplicity. None of them set out to be perfect out of the gate either. Cairo, HAL and D-Bus have all seen major API changes along the way. In other words they have all been iterative processes without falling into the trap of having too many cooks in the kitchen.

I pointed out HAL before because it really is an example of how a standards project off fd.o can become successful. I think these dynamics need to be understood so the community doesn’t waste its effort and then wonder why no one is adopting their work. So if I am harsh it is because I want to make sure people don’t dance around the issues. I am also harsh at points because if the community makes a big push to a broken standard then we end up having to live with it for a long time. I am also quick to sing the praises of projects that solve real world problems in creative ways. Prove me wrong about D-Conf and I will sing its praises.

This brings me to another point. Developers need to have the confidence in their skills that regardless of what I say or what opinion I have, they need to be able to continue with what they believe in. Of course there is a a fine line between confidence and self delusion. A confident person can take criticism in hand and use it to work harder at making their ideas a reality. They also have the wherewithal to reassess where they are at, admit to things that are lacking and be strong enough to stick to their guns on other things. I think your post showed some of that and perhaps D-Conf is in good hands after all. Only time will tell.

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