And just to be clear, harassing developers who have said "no I don't want to work on feature XYZ" is never acceptable and never has good results. If somebody says no and is just not interested, we leave them alone and we find someone else who does want to work on that feature.
Not having type-ahead, instead using gnome's search, makes GTK apps really annoying for me. Right now I have a solution that involves patching, but presuming that my ultimate goal is just that one concessions, just have a flag buried somewhere that would enable type-ahead instead of search, how do you suggest I get that done?
I think that would go a long way towards demonstrating that gnome can be reasoned with, is worth even approaching or talking to.
Could we hire a developer? Set up crowdfunding? Can someone give me a quote and I can see what resources I can bring to bear on the problem?
I'd be open to other suggestions on how to channel that energy productively, but I really think if they can't compromise on that one feature that's important to a bunch of people then they're probably not going to be worth dealing with. Feel free to send me an email, at gmail.
If it does get rejected then you do the same thing you'd do with any other open source project: convince your distro to carry the patch. I think the key here is to just not lose sight of the goal which is to get enough support somewhere to have the patch maintained, if you don't care to become an upstream developer and work closely with them then you can skip that and just do the same process but only with a downstream that is relevant to you.
If the patch still needs a lot of work/money to get it to the point where it's stable and doesn't break other things, well, now you know why upstream doesn't want to do it... so with that I would say a way to help would be to commit to maintaining this for however many years you expect to be using the patch. I can't give you a specific quote (I don't have any interest in working on this, sorry) but based on average developer rates you probably should expect to spend at least a few thousand dollars on this total, over several years of maintenance time, if you are not the one who is going to be writing the code. Of course, you can reduce the burden on yourself by getting a distro to share the cost, which is why I suggested that first :)
