Decision making in Mozilla... what adjectives come to mind? Lately, "clandestine" and "political". Who gets to make decisions, exactly? Do we have strong module ownership? Or is it enough to find a compliant driver or two, talk them around to your side, then slip in patches without ever consulting the module owner?
I hope it's the former, and I'd rather not get my hopes dashed.
Posted by bzbarsky at July 20, 2004 3:03 PMWell, there's a fine line between being a strong owner with a vision and someone who doesn't listen to others' opinions.
Posted by: alanjstr on July 20, 2004 7:22 PMYes, but there's something to be said for _asking_ the module owner's opinion.
Posted by: Boris on July 20, 2004 8:01 PMPersonally I think it should be drivers.
Since they ultimately push the product out the door. Module owners sometimes aren't looking at the big picture... only their little nitch.
Perhaps Module Owners/Drivers need to unify a bit?
Posted by: Robert Accettura on July 20, 2004 9:26 PMRobert, you seem to have misunderstood. I'm talking about going to drivers without ever having consulted with the module owner. I agree that in the end drivers should be deciding the direction of the project, as far as that goes. But for specific patches to specific modules, never even asking for module owner review is not cool.
Posted by: Boris on July 20, 2004 9:48 PMI agree Boris, that is totally uncool. If I were a module owner and would be owning a strongly owned module, then I would backout the patch.
But of course, you then have to take the heat for that. Not everybody likes to stay in the kitchen when it's hot here.
Posted by: Simon on July 21, 2004 2:42 AM2000-10-12: "If you don't have confidence in module owners to collectively make those decisions ... then that's a problem with your choice of module owners. Just adding more layers of government will not solve that problem." -- http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=39E5DA4F.8F078C46%40student.canterbury.ac.nz
(A couple of sentences in that post make me cringe in hindsight, but I still subscribe to the ideas lurking behind them.)
Posted by: mpt on July 26, 2004 3:58 AMHowdy Boris, this is your distant cousin Kirill. Whilst waiting for Matlab to finish being slow, I decided to browse the sites of some schools I plan to submit grad applications to come this fall. I was checking out the MIT website (8% admission 2003... only way I'm getting in is with a visitor's pass). Naturally, I thought of you and Google took me here. I am not the least bit surprised that you're developing for Mozilla (by my own statistics, math and physics people are the major contributors to open source projects). Being a die-hard Opera user, I was tempted to make flippant remarks about the browser, but I can't knock the Mo because it's the one I can expect to actually follow W3 specs. Don't know how periodically you check this, but shoot me an email or something. Later.
Posted by: Kirill Orlov on August 2, 2004 2:51 PMErk... mangled URL in previous post. Remove the period between the / and the ~.
Posted by: Kirill Orlov on August 2, 2004 2:52 PM