Doug Goldstein wrote:
The amount of time spent debating something over the pretty look and not over technical merits creates terrible signal-to-noise ratios (where I consider the pretty debates as noise and the technical merits as signal).
I'm not sure that much time on this list is spent debating "pretty look" - unless you're concerned that the EAPI-in-filename objection comes down to "looks." This is really a matter of elegant design and that certainly is a technical consideration. In any case, if the KDE team wanted to make the default color scheme dark gray on black I'd hope the council would step in. The council has overall responsibility for the direction of Gentoo and is not limited to considering only technical matters.
I think that half the reason the glep55 debate seems to have gotten so many people angry is that half of the flames amount to "you have no right to voice that opinion" or "your opinion doesn't matter." Maybe that should be true, and maybe it shouldn't be true. However, you aren't going to be making many friends with that approach.
Likewise, if 90% of the developers on a project don't think a change should happen, I'm not convinced that it should happen regardless of its merits. The 10% who think they have all the winning technical arguments should try persuading the 90% to agree rather than simply pointing out that they are wrong. It isn't like the average gentoo developer can't follow this stuff...
