Direction of Pidgin development

[Dale Worley]

On Mon, 2007-05-07 at 22:00 -0400, Etan Reisner wrote:
> What is your definition of *real* success? There are at the very least
> multiple tens of thousands of gaim/pidgin downloads (if not multiple
> hundreds of thousands). Does that not qualify as *real* success in your
> book?

Well, no, that's maybe 0.01% of all computer users, even assuming they
all use it.  It may be your definition of success, though.

> Whether people use or don't use our project has little real world
> effect on us, I for one would work on it regardless of whether
> anyone else used it.

> I'm not entirely certain what the point of this post was either.

The point of the post was that you've got to be aware of whether you're
building something to be used by people like you, or by a population
more closely approximating the masses.  That decision affects a large
number of aspects of the project, including how much effort needs to be
put into making the UI comprehensible, how you publicize the project,
how you interact with newcomers, what aspects of the project take the
most labor, etc.

What I saw was a discussion of the UI for the various settings, but it
seems that the people discussing that topic hadn't first come to a
consensus regarding who the target audience is.  And you really can't
have a workable strategy for UI without knowing who you're targeting the
software to.

Dale