Mozilla/Enterprise discussion IRC log. Fascinating misunderstandings | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla/Enterprise discussion IRC log. Fascinating misunderstandings

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27 pointsAndrewDucker9 comments

I'm not sure exactly why this is here or which part(s) AndrewDucker's title is meant to apply to. Note that this log is just the IRC back-channel of a meeting that was primarily a phone conference, so a lot of the context is lost and only a few of the participants' views are represented. It looks like the real minutes from this meeting have not been put up on the wiki yet (they usually get cleaned up first to make them readable and to remove information that participants don't want on the public/indexed web). I'll contact Stormy about that in case she just forgot to paste them.

If you want to see the real discussion minutes of the previous meeting, check out https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Meetings/2011_Aug

And if you want to see the Extended Support Release proposal the group is currently working on (which was the product of the same September 2011 meeting as this IRC log, it's here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:...

To get involved in the discussion, join the mailing list or the meetings, or see the threads on the public mozilla.dev.planning newsgroup: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise

(disclosure: I'm a Mozilla employee, though I'm not directly involved in the Enterprise User Group.)

The bit the title is referring to is when there are people on one side saying "But surely you can just write to the standards!" and people on the other saying "That's not how Enterprises work!"

I found the communication between the various people fascinating, and figured that so might some others.

And I'd love to link to the actual meeting minutes, but despite it saying that the minutes would be up to date by the 12th of September, they aren't there yet:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Meetings/2011_Sep#Meetin...

Yes, "just use standards!!" has been an ongoing refrain from a few people whenever anyone talks about not supporting all browsers. Fortunately, I know the decision-makers within the Mozilla project are well aware of the reasons and reality that not every web app is fully standards-based and cross-browser compatible.

[My apologies for the tone; I have now deleted that bit of my comment.]

Yes - I work for a large company, and we have exactly the same arguments here about "the right way" as against the "cost-effective/pragmatic way". It's not an easy thing to tease out, and keep yourself pointing in the right direction while compromising on the way there.

And Mozilla have it particularly hard, with people questioning everything they do, and misunderstandings rife across the internet (there was an article on The Register recently which made my blood boil).

[I've removed that part of mine too.]

Well, if you code something up cost-effectively to save on initial investment, you should be aware of the cost of re-working the solution if the solution becomes more permanent. Blaiming these type of deficiencies on Mozilla effectively is just tranfering cost off your company. So the LTS should be funded by the asking customers. I'm not sure if this is already taking place, but just blaming Mozilla for not standing still seems out of place.

Depends on whether Mozilla _wants_ to serve those customers. Mozilla's not a for-profit company, its aim is to get its browser into as many places as possible. If it does that by spending a bit of cash/worker time on a project to make it more amenable to Enterprises then that helps its aims too. The question is where is the cash best spent.

Is it just me, or do other people find IRC logs incredibly hard to follow? Even IRC chats in real time are hard to follow.

You have N people, with up to N*(N-1)/2 different interactions/conversations, all serialized onto a single interleaved display. I can't imagine how people find it useful.

I think it's fine if the client assigns different colors to each nickname, like Weechat does. But bare text can be hard to follow, yes.

I've ran the log through irclog2html and uploaded the result here, maybe it can help: http://pastehtml.com/view/b9p8ofymh.html

can someone do a TL:DR on this please?

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