Okay, okay

[Etan Reisner]

On Sat, May 19, 2007 at 08:21:26PM -0500, Andrew Rodland wrote:
> I won't abuse you guys anymore. You don't need it, and I don't have the time.
> But please, just think on this. When you make a change in the name of
> simplicity, and thousands of people take the time to tell you that you've
> made their lives more complex, not less -- there may be a problem. If you
> feel the need to lock a ticket because it's a dead horse that's been kicked
> too long -- maybe the horse just needs to get up and realize it's been
> kicked. And if this happens _repeatedly_ then maybe it's time to ask
> yourselves whether you're lining up to be the next XFree86. You don't want
> that, neither do I. That's all I've ever been saying.
>
> Andrew

As has been subtly pointed out in both this thread and the other no one on
this side of the fence seems to think 'thousands of people' is anything
even remotely close to accurate. In fact Sean comments on the number of
people complaining about this in ticket 414, but I find it likely that you
(and most of the other people who keep bringing this up) haven't read that
ticket closely enough to have noticed. Even if you want to bring Sean's
numbers up-to-date by including the number of people who have commented on
this on this mailing list and in both the pidgin and pidgin-win32 irc
channels (and you 'optimistically' assume that the 100 users granted as a
worst-case by Sean in 414 is an approximate number for each of pidgin and
pidgin-win32) you only get around 350-400 people who have commented. And
in case I wasn't making this clear I think that is a *wildly* exaggerated
count. But even given 400 people that is an overwhelmingly small
percentage of the pidgin user base and as we have commented numerous
times, not a single reason we have been given is actually a reason for
bringing them back nearly as much as they are reasons for fixing other
things to work better.

All of this doesn't even include the fact that many of the people who have
complained in either of the irc channels have either come to realize the
current way is better, or that the change didn't actually matter.

This horse has been beaten to death, but almost all of the blows have come
from the side of people wanting the change undone but without any 'new and
unrefuted' reasons having been given. If you (or anyone else) wants them
back then that person needs to read *all* of the discussion about this
that has taken place in ticket 414, this mailing list, the other handful
of tickets, and the sf forums. Having don that they need to come up with
arguments that we haven't yet heard and refuted, or come up with new
reasons for the old arguments and try to convince us of them. This doesn't
happen, no one who wants them tends to bother even trying to read and
understand our arguments and refutations. They just complain and open new
tickets without adding any new ideas.

	-Etan