[TEAM] Drop XChat for 14.10

[Pasi Lallinaho]

On 2014-07-31 15:43, Elfy wrote:
> On 31/07/14 08:44, Simon Steinbeiß wrote:
>> [snip] Be that as it may... Why I wanted to go ahead with this 
>> proposal is because I think that 14.10 is the perfect time to 
>> experiment a bit and get some feedback on things. If people complain 
>> about the lack of XChat – if there's a shitstorm about it even – I 
>> wouldn't take that as a failure of our decision but as a great reason 
>> to install it again by default, knowing for sure that it makes sense 
>> for many users. 
>
> Then it seem disingenuous to ask for people to vote on  a proposal if 
> what you really want to do - is can xchat anyway.

Not asking and being open for feedback would have brought up another 
kind of negativity. At least we can now hear different arguments for 
keeping or ditching it and be more informed about the decision, even if 
it was to try dropping Xchat anyway.

As Simon said, there's always the possibility to revert the change; we 
are very far away from the next LTS release, so there is still time to 
include something else and get it tested thoroughly enough even if we 
missed it being in 14.10. Dropping an application that provides an 
important feature for (part of the) target audience in a later release 
(like 15.04 or 15.10) has a much bigger potential chance to mess up 
things than doing it late in the LTS metacycle.

> That said, if the reason is to gauge all people's use of IRC - then 
> remove pidgin as well. Or make it so people can't use pidgin for IRC.

This is an unfair thing to say. I don't understand how dropping an 
application from the default seed can be said to gauge using the feature 
it brings to the seed for good, especially since there are other ways to 
do it.

With this logic, nobody can now import and organize their photo 
collections since we dropped gThumb – with which we went even further 
because it was the *only* application that allowed people doing that.

We need to be able to consider any given issue as objectively as 
possible, or at least subjectively, but from the Xubuntu target 
audiences point of view.

As always, advanced users (or those who need advanced features from an 
application) can always install something else from the repositories, 
and very likely ends up doing that anyway.

> Anway - I'm still -1 but have used enough energy on this now.

I understand that there are issues and things that are closer to you 
than others, and it's great to see people defending their point of view. 
However, let's try not to burn ourselves out by arguing with each other 
– ultimately, we're on the same side.

Cheers,
Pasi

-- 
Pasi Lallinaho (knome)                » http://open.knome.fi/
Leader of Shimmer Project             » http://shimmerproject.org/
Ubuntu member, Xubuntu team member    » http://xubuntu.org/