Hi, 2008/6/21 Jason D. Clinton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > In my opinion, whatever "The Next-Gen Gnome" is, it isn't going to happen > until we really, really have a deep maintenance cycle going on here. That > means fixing a Handful of Giant Warts on our maintenance process:
I bet the next-gen gnome will happen when someone writes it. I would suggest people think in terms of getting something going by themselves, and once it's at least roughly usable, think about recruiting 2 or 3 or 5 other people to the project. But getting hundreds of people to agree up front isn't too likely. Think 5 not 500. I'd suggest also that "next-gen gnome" is a bad framing. It's the same broken mindset as "GNOME 3.0." GNOME _the desktop_ does not need a 3.0 or a next-gen in particular. I think most of the current users, and current involved OS vendors would basically be against major change in the target audience of today's GNOME desktop (current Linux users). I mean, even if individuals at those companies are in favor in principle, it's not their day job and their day job has major pressures to focus on the current audience. Don't misunderstand my point here: I don't think anyone should "cave" to current users or commercial pressures. I do think that it's impractical to ignore almost everyone currently working on or using the software, though. You just can't fight that momentum. It isn't even correct to fight it. There are lots of users there with expectations. The goal is not to randomly churn up the GNOME desktop as it exists today (window manager, session manager, panel, etc.) - that thing should just keep evolving in incremental fashion, getting better all the time for the people who use it. The goal should be to find all the new directions, and see if GNOME can start to be about those too. Right now there are lots of new directions in mobile, set-top boxes, EeePC-type thingies, for example. Why does the front page of gnome.org still say "GNOME offers a desktop" - excluding these directions from "GNOME"? That's a problem. The "GNOME stack" potentially has much wider applicability. Is there a list somewhere of the rich ecosystem of consulting companies and libraries and products that build on the GTK/GNOME technology stack? Why isn't gnome.org positioned as about that list, with "the desktop" as only one of the things on the list? I bet a solid fraction of our community isn't even primarily focused on "the desktop" anymore... could be a majority even. But the Fedora/Ubuntu/Suse framing of GNOME-as-desktop remains dominant despite all the smaller companies who are doing other stuff. GNOME could be instead of "a desktop" something like "a development community for open source user experience technologies, on all platforms including Linux, Windows, and mobile devices" or something like that. I don't know. Some broader goal. Describe the community, not one of its products. I don't think git or mono have much to do with anything. If you start a 1-person or 5-person project, you can use whichever vcs or language you want. And the bottom line is that anyone who blames their version control system for inability to get stuff done is not the kind of person who gets stuff done. git did not exist when the vast majority of the tens of millions of lines of open source code were first written. (Maybe GNOME or parts of GNOME should switch to git or mono, not debating that, I just think it's bogus to say either one is truly what's blocking innovative new projects.) People should also think creatively about how to get things done, beyond just writing code. Miguel and Nat back in the day created International GNOME Support, and that was only one of the companies involved. The GNOME Foundation was created as well. Today, you see plenty of small companies around GNOME. These are all people thinking not only about what code to write, but how to add more time and more people focused on the project. Havoc _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
