Jason:
We need to tap in to the wave of energy generated by the The Thread on Planet Gnome. Already, it's apparent that the fervor that surrounded it has started to dwindle. A ton of interesting ideas were thrown out and lot of belly-aching about no one taking responsibility for making it happen was heard.
That is not quite true. There is a lot going on to make the GNOME Developer Platform more rich and stable, making GNOME a richer development platform for third-party ISV's. As GNOME slowly develops more and more interest from third-party ISV's (such as Adobe and Real) the platform becomes more usable to a wider audience. Some examples currently underway include gail merging into GTK+, accessibility moving away from ORBit2 and towards D-Bus, gvfs replacing gnome-vfs, and so on. This is in relation to Project Ridley [1]. So, there is a lot of digging in the trenches to prepare GNOME for taking things to the next level, I think.
It's clear from The Thread that we need to "Get Our House In Order". There's nearly universal agreement that Gnome lacks leadership in the sense that there's someone that sets release goals. 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:
In addition to having a richer developer platform, it is probably necessary for GNOME to get some sort of a face-lift in order to warrant next generation attention. This probably would require some addition of needed functionality, and some theming/visual elements. Compiz, Clutter, and/or pigment could be a part of this. Work seems to be fairly active in these areas.
1. DVCS needs to happen; now. It's time. The number of people using a DVCS frontend to circumvent the insanity of SVN continues to grow. In that vein, we need to a) debate the One True DVCS for Gnome, b) delinate the work that needs to be done to get there and set a timeframe, and c) find the man power to do it.
This would have little impact on end-users, I think.
2. The Giant Rift in the Gnome community over Mono has to end. I hate Mono as much as the next guy but it's quite apparent now that some really cool stuff with financial backing from Big Linux Distributor is not going away: Gnome Main Menu, Banshee, F-Spot, Beagle, Tomboy, etc. We have to get rid of the rift and bring the two diverging communities back together. Whatever damage that might incur in the minds of the Slashdot crowd has already been done--Gnome is perceived (rightly or wrongly) to be largley 'infested with Mono' in the minds of our critics. We cannot capitulate on this to appease a vocal minority of users that detest Mono. It's obvious it's not going away and, with a trivial amount of work, we can mend the rift by including the afore-mentioned mondules in our official releases. Let's just do it and move on with our lives.
Solaris doesn't distribute with Mono, but I wouldn't say anybody at Sun detests Mono. Mono is great! Aside from causing some distros to have slightly different applications (e.g. Beagle versus MetaTracker), I do not think whether Mono is used on a given distro causes end-users much grief. In some ways, I think the fact that distros differentiate themselves a bit is probably a good thing. It gives people some choices to consider when they pick a distro.
3. Marketing to developers must get ramped up; we agree that we need a new generation of awesome developers to bring new ideas and blood in to our process. A number of our Gnome modules are in "barely maintained" mode. With new blood, we can reinvigorate 2.x while looking to the future. And I've volunteer for this one in the form of 15 minute screen casts. However, it needs web hosting space. And that needs Gnome resources. What do we have to do to make this hosting happen? What else can we do to get more developers?
The GNOME project has a marketing-list, and you are right that there does not seem to be enough volunteers or energy to do a lot of exciting
things. If you, or anybody has an interest, I'd get involved. I think its good to discuss what sort of features we should consider in taking GNOME to the next generation, so I appreciate your suggestions. Brian [1] http://live.gnome.org/ProjectRidley _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
