Andrew Sobala wrote: > And it can *all* be done *now.* That's the point. It's big. It's hard. > It's a lot of work. But there's nothing to stop any of these ideas being > implemented. And when we have the code to make this all work, we can > build something new: the next generation desktop, and call it GNOME 3.0. > But we can't keep doing "little" point-release things and pass a future > point-release off as GNOME 3.0 - it doesn't work like that. We'd be > crucified.
Yes, we can do it now, and people *are* doing it now. And each cool new feature will get added to some release as it becomes available. And when the last feature on that list gets committed to CVS, and Alan says "OK, NOW can we call it 3.0?", people will say "Oh, come on! How can we call this release 3.0? It's clearly just an incremental improvement over 2.38!" The only way we can get a major-version-number-bump-worthy release is if we write a whole lot of cool code and then *don't release it*. We managed to do that from 1.4 -> 2.0, because we totally rewrote the lowest-level libraries, so no one could release their spiffy new pangoized apps until GObject was ready, and no one could release their spiffy new GObject-based libraries until pango was ready, etc, and the total API churn was sufficiently large that no one wanted to bother trying to backport much from 1.9 to 1.4. And so every new feature that anyone added anywhere got held back, until the entire desktop could be released together as 2.0. The only way this is going to happen again is if there is similarly massive infrastructural change, and I don't see that happening. (Or if we deliberately held back working features in one app until there were corresponding features in every other app as well, and I see that happening even less.) I don't think there will ever be another quantum leap forward in GNOME functionality between two consecutive releases. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I'd rather get a new GNOME release with 1 point worth of improvements every 6 months than wait 2 years to get a release with 5 points worth of improvements. So I don't think we'll ever reach reach a point where we could jump to "GNOME 3.0" and not feel silly. But at the same time, stick with "2.x" forever is just as silly. So how about we pull a Solaris and call this fall's release "GNOME 16", next spring's "GNOME 18", etc? -- Dan _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list