[Gimp-web] the GIMP website

[Raphaël Quinet]

On Tue, 23 Sep 2003 23:19:50 -0400, Carol Spears <carol@gimp.org> wrote:
> There are some very wrong ways that this organization works.

Certainly.  Like many other organizations.  Nobody is perfect.

> If I have a problem with the content being removed, I should be able to 
> say no, and everyone who helped me to put the content together in the 
> first place is represented with my simple no.

This sentence is misleading.  It sounds like some important content
would have been deleted from the web site against the will of a whole
team.  This is an incorrect (or biased) point of view.  Here is mine:

- What we were talking about (please correct me if I am wrong) was not
  the removal of any content, but only the temporary removal of two
  links from the navigation menu.  One of them has already been
  restored, and the other one may be restored soon.  Note that the
  pages were still available.

- Removing some links temporarily can be a good solution (especially
  when a site is about to be launched) if the pages that they are
  linking to are broken or incomplete.  This gives a bit more time to
  fix these pages without getting complaints from our visitors.

- Even if the problem had been about the removal of some contents and
  not the removal of some links, this would not necessarily be a bad
  thing: in many cases, improving a site implies the removal of some
  outdated or incorrect contents and its replacement by some new
  contents.  I suppose that you can agree with that.

- Since we are using CVS, nothing is really removed.  If someone
  deletes a file or deletes text from a file, it is always possible to
  restore it.  Of course, we should all try to agree on what we are
  doing so that it never necessary to restore anything from a previous
  version.  But that option is always available.

> I am being accused of being not nice, however I sent the email in which 
> I nicely begged (through some tears, btw) that the site be left as the 
> team made it.  This was private mail that apparently went unread, as it 
> was unanswered and ignored.

"The team" as you describe it has evolved over time.  Also, I do not
want to quote a private message on a public mailing list, but what you
wrote to me was not so nice.  The wording was polite (although a bit
cahotic), but the background was short of being insulting in the way
you considered the work that "the team" has put into the site in the
last months.

> I did everything nicely, and got no where.

What triggered my reply to scizzo's message was the fact that you were
not nice at all: you told him that he was fired, and you threatened to
remove the gimp-web module from cvs.  You are part of those who
contributed to this cvs module and you certainly did put quite some
work into it (yes, I do appreciate what you did for the web site), but
you are not alone and I do not think that you did everything nicely
when you threatened to destroy the work of others.

[...]
> Rapha?l, you could not get ssi to work on your site so you rewrote what 
> Helvetix and yosh wrote?

Please do not twist the facts like that.  I asked Helvetix to change
the way the pages were built because most of the build system was
ready to generate static pages from the ssi pages.  I wouldn't have
asked that if it would have implied a complete rewrite of the build
system just before the official launch of the site.  Some contributors
said that it was a bit too difficult to build and test the new site.
I thought (maybe I am wrong) that allowing testing without requiring
SSI would make it easier for potential contributors to join the team.

Besides the simplifications in the build system and the reduced load
on the web server, there was another, more personal, reason to get
static pages...  We wanted to launch the site this month.  The date
has been shifted several times, but it was urgent to fix the most
obvious problems before the launch.  Then I got some problems with my
PC at home and although I have other machines at my disposal, the only
one that I could use in the last weeks was an old laptop that does not
have quite enough disk space and memory to install and run Apache with
SSI.  I wanted to be able to fix as many open bugs as possible before
the launch, so I had to find a quick solution that would allow me to
test what I was doing (until my PC was fixed).  So I asked Helvetix to
enable the SSI rewriting in the Makefile.  I also worked on the
Makefile a bit to fix some other issues and to re-enable the rewriting
step after it was reverted.

> Would you have been so quick to do this had 
> you known the people who helped to make it as it was when it was ready 
> to move?

It is not nice to insinuate things like that.  For your information, I
was fully aware of who had written the code.  I did look at the code
and at the ChangeLog before posting anything about it.  I also tried
to understand how it was working before proposing to change it.  And
it is because I knew who had worked on it that I posted my requests
here.  I also knew that it would not involve a complete re-write.

[...]
> But the community needs to think about how a man who types nice email is=
 
> allowed to totally undo very thought out mechanisms by two masters. 
>  While the girl who wants to make a web site gets turned into a 
> blithering idiot because no one agrees until the "big guy" gets up and 
> says I am right. Did the quality of what I was saying change because 
> someone less feminine agreed with me? Ask yourself.  Also, ask yourself 
> why I was not effective when I was nice.

Were you really serious when you wrote that paragraph?  I skipped the
other paragraphs in which you are distorting the facts, but that one
is a real gem.  I hope that nobody believes what you wrote above,
including yourself.

> Lets ask all the gimp people I spoke with when coming up with the 
> content originally why they would encourage me and contribute to 
> something you guys seem not to like now.

Maybe you forgot, but I was one of the gimp people with whom you spoke
two years ago about the new content.  And I do like the new contents
that are present in this new site and were not present in the old one
(especially the tutorials).  So don't paint yourself as a victim when
you aren't.

What I do not like, though, are the parts of the site that are linking
to broken or mostly empty pages.  These links should be hidden until
their target can be improved (or there should at least be a suitable
warning next to the links, so that our visitors know what to expect).
There were several broken links in the site; scizzo and others did
their best to contain the brokenness.

Maybe I was wrong yesterday about the contest: I thought that it was
still broken but apparently it is working fine now.  So I shouldn't
have thanked scizzo for removing it, and maybe we should restore the
link now (see my other message).  Everybody can make mistakes from
time to time, scizzo and myself included.  But I think that you
over-reacted (well, everybody did, including myself).

> mmmaybe will never move.  it will never be wgo.  play with it all you 
> want, it is not worth the three hours it will take to move it.  It will 
> never have a legitimate bug report either, as there is not a way to file=
 
> a bug for this site.  

I hope that mmmaybe will move today or very soon, otherwise those who
have spent so much time on this site during the last months would have
just wasted their time.  Ruining all these efforts by trying to
prevent it from becoming the official GIMP site is certainly not a
good way to show that you care about the GIMP and the GIMP web site.
Starting another site from scratch would just be a way to prove that
you only care about the GIMP as long as everybody plays your game
instead of a team game.

> any questions?  file your complaints at bugzilla under www.gimp.org.
> 

Yes, this is the appropriate way to report bugs related to the web
site.  What is that supposed to mean?

> thanks for all your help when i asked nicely last march.
> 

Thanks for your help as well.

Now, we could continue this thread forever and I am not sure that it
would improve the current situation very much.  Regardless of how this
continues, I would like to end this message on a slightly more
positive note: if I over-reacted yesterday, then please accept my
apologies.  If you want the link to the contest to be restored and if
there was no good reason to hide it, then I will restore it.

-Raphaël