Re: Intent to retire people.gnome.org (31th of March)

[Michael Catanzaro]

Hi Andrea, I've pushed all the screenshots here:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/Infrastructure/static-web/-/commit/d205056a93ab19e53afbb1fe53310d71d7f0afd1

so it should be easy to set up a redirect now. I've also submitted MRs 
to all affected apps to transition them from using the people.gnome.org 
URLs to using GitLab instead.


Michael


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Re: Intent to retire people.gnome.org (31th of March)

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Wed, Mar 9 2022 at 06:07:18 PM +0100, Andrea Veri  
wrote:
Adding redirects once the service is down is a viable option, you can 
push those images to static.g.o and we can add a redirect afterwards 
to make sure stuff won't break. Let me know whether that works for 
you, thanks!


Oh OK, yes that would work fine. The content is static.


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Re: Intent to retire people.gnome.org (31th of March)

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Wed, Mar 9 2022 at 05:44:04 PM +0100, Andrea Veri  
wrote:
With that in mind and unless anyone within the community objects with 
a good rationale we'll be retiring the service by the 31th of March.


Sadly I have images for appstream metadata hosted here (seemed like a 
good idea back in 2014, oops), meaning once it goes down, older 
releases will no longer display images in GNOME Software if distros 
rebuild their appstream metadata. Potentially affected apps: 
five-or-more, four-in-a-row, gnome-calculator, gnome-chess, 
gnome-klotski, gnome-mahjongg, gnome-mines, gnome-nibbles, 
gnome-robots, gnome-sudoku, gnome-taquin, gnome-tetravex, hitori, 
iagno, lightsoff, quadrapassel, swell-foop, tali. These images are very 
stale, so hopefully some apps have refreshed their images since I 
created them, but the rest will break. I'll go through them all soon 
and migrate all images to GitLab to ensure that GNOME 42 releases will 
be OK, but of course there is no way to fix older releases.


I also had a bunch of tarballs hosted here too, but it looks like 
release team is no longer using them due to infrastructure 
improvements, so that's no problem.


Michael


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Re: GNOME Chat Platforms Evaluation Survey

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Tue, May 11 2021 at 04:23:13 PM +0200, Oliver Propst 
 wrote:

Well I think basically it has expired.


Oh I see, the mail was sent on March 4, but got stuck in moderation for 
two months until May 11. Alas!



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Re: GNOME Chat Platforms Evaluation Survey

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Thu, Mar 4 2021 at 01:05:03 PM +0100, Kristi Progri 
 wrote:
Please fill out this survey [https://surveys.gnome.org/267157?lang=en 
4] to share with us your feedback.

 The whole survey will take you around 10 minutes to fill it out.


The survey is broken:

"""
We are sorry but the survey is expired and no longer available.

For further information please contact GNOME Surveys:
nore...@gnome.org
"""


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Re: Announcing Board of Directors Elections 2020

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 2:55 pm, Andrea Veri  wrote:
The deadline for submitting candidacies is tomorrow, please send your 
one in if you're willing to run for this year's elections :-)


Currently we have only one candidate (Regina) to replace four open 
seats. Do the bylaws specify what happens if we have fewer than four 
candidates?



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Re: Moving foundation-list to discourse?

[Michael Catanzaro]

I won't take a stance on Discourse but I would like to hear from our 
Discourse moderators about their thoughts on a couple moderation issues 
I've noticed.


#1, posts are being hidden rather aggressively, including seemingly 
innocuous posts like 
https://discourse.gnome.org/t/are-you-happy-with-javascript-programming-language-used-by-gnome-project/1744:


"""
I would like to ask if is there anything that annoys you about 
JavaScript, what makes you angry or inefficient while working with this 
language, or maybe what others do incorrectly when using this language 
to develop Gnome Shell Extensions and Applications.


Is JavaScript here (In the Gnome community) to stay for a long, what 
would be better and why?

"""

I can't imagine any reason that should have been hidden. It makes the 
rest of the topic hard to follow. I'm not sure why users flagged this 
topic (maybe misclicks?) or why human moderators didn't correct it (are 
there humans reviewing reported posts)? Furthermore, it's the first 
post in the topic. Surely the entire topic should be hidden if the 
first post is hidden, since it would be nonsensical to view a topic 
without its starting point.


Another less-serious example of a moderation problem, here:

https://discourse.gnome.org/t/official-applications/1663/2

A low-quality post was hidden, but the follow-up post was not. Now 
people reading the topic will want to go back to the hidden post to see 
why Pavlo wrote what he did. When a post is removed, any other posts 
quoting it should also be removed or the discussion doesn't flow 
properly without the hidden posts, and the point of having hidden the 
first post is defeated.


Michael


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Re: Preliminary Results - GNOME Foundation Board of Directors Elections 2017

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 8:51 PM, Richard Stallman  wrote:

> This year we had 225 registered voters, 110 of which sent in valid
  > ballots.

I am not surprised that so few voted.  Can anyone think of a way
to encourage more candidates?


For comparison, last year we had 253 registered voters and 142 valid 
ballots. So turnout has only declined from 56% to 49%, which is not 
that big a change. The bigger change is that the electorate has shrunk 
by 11% in one year.


In 2015 we had 273 registered voters and 149 valid ballots, so 55% 
participation.


If anyone wants to investigate further back, you can check the June 
archives on [1].


Michael

[1] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/

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Re: GNOME Board of Directors Foundation Elections 2017 - Candidates

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Thu, Jun 1, 2017 at 4:08 AM, Allan Day  wrote:

My immediate thought is that it could put some people off running,
since it's a greater commitment. However, I'd be interested to hear
what you think about it.

Allan


Yes, that's the main risk.

The benefit is we would only be electing three or four candidates per 
year, so the elections would be more competitive.


Michael

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Re: GNOME Board of Directors Foundation Elections 2017 - Candidates

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Fri, May 26, 2017 at 4:23 AM, Andrea Veri  wrote:

Foundation Members are welcome to ask questions to the candidates on
foundation-list. Please try to avoid duplicates, and bear in mind
candidates invest a lot of time in answering questions.


Here's a question... if we have seven candidates for seven positions, 
are we really going to run an election just to rank them? There doesn't 
seem to be much point in doing this.


Here's another question: what do the candidates think about switching 
to using two-year terms?


Michael

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Re: Broken links on trademark guidelines page

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Mon, 2017-02-13 at 11:48 +, Allan Day wrote:
> I didn't realise that page existed! How did you end up there?

Hi,

I searched the wiki for "trademark."

Michael
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Broken links on trademark guidelines page

[Michael Catanzaro]

Hi,

A bunch of links to our trademark guidelines are broken on this page:

https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Resources/Trademark/FAQ

All four links to foundation.gnome.org are broken.

Also, the link to https://wiki.gnome.org/BrandGuidelines should be
updated.

It's immutable to me. I guess only the highest powers that be can fix
it.

Michael
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Re: Code of Conduct Adoption Process

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Fri, 2016-09-16 at 20:33 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
> Ironically, I was serving as his conduit into the list(s).
> I will certainly stop.
> 
> Which of these lists is he banned from?  Both?

I don't know, but maybe he's just not subscribed. If so, his posts
won't appear until approved by a moderator.

Michael
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Re: Minutes of the Board meeting of August, 2nd, 2016

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Mon, 2016-08-29 at 16:58 -0400, James wrote:
> Is this something that is upcoming or already happened?
> 
> Thanks,
> James

It's upcoming in October. I don't think any details have been published
yet for this year, but historically it begins the Saturday before
Columbus Day and ends on that day, each year, in either Boston or
Montreal.

Michael
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Re: Minutes of the Board Meeting of July, 05th, 2016

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Thu, 2016-07-07 at 11:51 +0200, Andrea Veri wrote:
> = Foundation Board Minutes for Monday, July 5th 2016, 17:00 UTC =
> 
> Next meeting date Tuesday, July 12th, 17:00 UTC

Hi,

I don't see any minutes for any board meetings more recent than July
5th; is the new board planning to post meeting minutes?

(Thanks to Andrea for regularly posting minutes relatively regularly!)

Michael

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Re: Really professional GNOME videos

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Sun, 2016-03-27 at 07:53 +, Florian Müllner wrote:
> Distributions appear in the video in the order of when 3.20 is
> expected to
> be included in the distribution.

It's hard to believe that's what's intended. If so, it's very wrong.
The order depicted in the video is:

Arch -> Debian -> Fedora -> openSUSE

which is correct under no interpretation I can think of. How could
Debian possibly be depicted prior to Fedora? If we are counting stable
distros, then Debian should be towards the end of the list, after even
Ubuntu. Same for openSUSE:

Arch (April) -> Fedora (June) -> (Ubuntu, October) -> openSUSE?
(November?) -> Debian (2017) -> openSUSE? (November 2017?)

I do not know where openSUSE goes in relation to Debian, because they
have the new enterprise base thing going on, and I am not sure what
their GNOME plans are for the next release. If they release in November
with GNOME 3.20, then they belong in front of Debian; if they release
with 3.18 or perhaps 3.16 again, then they belong behind Debian.

Now, if we are counting unstable distros (which I do not think we
should do), then the order would be:

Fedora rawhide (immediate) -> Arch Gnome-Unstable (already has it) ->
openSUSE Tumbleweed (probably early April) -> Debian sid (probably this
spring) -> Ubuntu (probably this summer)

I don't see any way that Arch -> Debian -> Fedora -> openSUSE could
possibly be interpreted as the correct order, if that graphic is really
intended to signify the real order.

Michael
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Re: Supporting GTK+

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Thu, 2016-01-21 at 11:58 +0300, Виталий wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I tested the example (example-0.c
>  ) on
> Windows 10 Enterprise (10240), but I get a runtime error 'Unspecified
> fatal
> error encountered, aborting.'. I'm using VS2015 IDE Update 1, and the
> stack
> (https://github.com/wingtk/gtk-win32/pull/18). Please let me know
> whether
> you're testing the latest release of the library GTK 3.18.6 stack on
> OS
> Windows 10. 

Hi,

You should send this question to gtk-l...@gnome.org

Good luck,

Michael
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Re: Free software streaming

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Sat, 2016-01-09 at 15:46 +0100, Mathieu Duponchelle wrote:
> Hey, you did not react to Nicolas Dufresne's suggestion of using
> webrtc ?
> Services like appear.in do not require installing extra software, as
> most
> of the heavy lifting is already done by modern browsers ( I'm sure
> someone
> will implement support in emacs at some point :) ).

I agree, WebRTC is clearly the winning technology and the way to go in
the future.

It's not true that all modern browsers support it, though, so I don't
think it's fair to start using it quite yet. The implementation in
WebKit, for example, is still buggy and disabled in both WebKitGTK+ and
Safari. That needs fixed before we start using it for GNOME events,
else people won't be able to participate with the GNOME web browser

Michael
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Re: Agenda for board meeting on November 3rd

[Michael Catanzaro]

Hi,

I suggest you consider whether boycotting proprietary app stores is the
really best way to advance free software, considering that 99% of users
on such platforms will not install our free software unless it is
available via the app stores.

Michael
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Re: Hello to Foundation List

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Thu, 2015-09-17 at 15:45 +0100, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
> Welcome Siska, it was a pleasure to meet you at GUADEC, we need
> people as
> cheerful and energetic as you are so I am really glad you're a
> foundation
> member now.

Quite true. Welcome! :)

Michael
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Re: User Data Manifesto

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Mon, 2015-08-17 at 11:31 +0100, Allan Day wrote:
 Any thoughts?

It looks quite good for the most part. I would change:

Users should not rely on centralised services.

to:

Users should not rely on centralised services that do not provide
control, knowledge, and freedom.

Otherwise it's really the OwnCloud manifesto. ;) But I think it's fine
for GNOME to sign.

Michael
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Re: User Data Manifesto

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Mon, 2015-08-17 at 11:31 +0100, Allan Day wrote:
 Hi all,
 
 Our friends at ownCloud have been in touch to see if we want to
 endorse the next version of the User Data Manifesto [1]. This is due
 to be launched at the ownCloud contributor conference at the end of
 August. A number of other prominent FOSS projects are lined up to
 also
 endorse it.
 
 Any thoughts?
 
 Allan
 ---
 [1] https://userdatamanifesto.org/2.0/

Their server is redirecting to HTTPS but not sending any chain of
trust, which is broken, so I haven't read it yet:

$ gnutls-cli userdatamanifesto.org
Processed 187 CA certificate(s).
Resolving 'userdatamanifesto.org'...
Connecting to '188.138.57.103:443'...
- Certificate type: X.509
- Got a certificate list of 1 certificates.
- Certificate[0] info:
 - subject `C=DE,CN=www.userdatamanifesto.org,EMAIL=karlitsc...@gmx.de'
, issuer `C=IL,O=StartCom Ltd.,OU=Secure Digital Certificate
Signing,CN=StartCom Class 1 Primary Intermediate Server CA', RSA key
4096 bits, signed using RSA-SHA256, activated `2014-09-06 02:06:49
UTC', expires `2015-09-07 04:56:06 UTC', SHA-1 fingerprint
`aa1400d9651fffab672deaf4cb4dac21bb47adf9'
Public Key ID:
11663c12895efa7017988a93f8f2a55ab79326b7
Public key's random art:
+--[ RSA 4096]+
| ..*+|
|. *o+.   |
| . + + ..o   |
|. + = . ..   |
| . . + .S|
|. . . .  |
| o.o..   |
| .+.=.   |
|.. +Eo   |
+-+

- Status: The certificate is NOT trusted. The certificate issuer is
unknown. 
*** PKI verification of server certificate failed...
*** Fatal error: Error in the certificate.
*** Handshake has failed
GnuTLS error: Error in the certificate.
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Re: gnomes collecting pants nominations

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Sat, 2015-07-18 at 12:33 -0400, Jeff Fortin Tam wrote:
 * Is not a board member (since the board decides who the winner is).

Quick question: does this rule exclude current board members, incoming
board members, or both?

Thanks,

Michael
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Re: Agenda for board meeting on July 7th

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Thu, 2015-07-09 at 19:17 -0700, Josh Triplett wrote:
 I'm much less concerned about whether they want GNOME's *support* (as 
 it
 seems rather unlikely either that they'd seek such support or that 
 we'd
 offer it), and more concerned about whether they're actually acting 
 in
 good faith or whether they might be doing something that will 
 actively
 damage the reputations of Linux, GNU, GNOME, and other Free Software
 projects.

Basically, they're taking advantage of people who don't know enough
about Linux to realize they are just a clone of much more serious
operating systems shipping GNOME that are already available for free.
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Question to board candidates: privacy funds

[Michael Catanzaro]

In 2013 we raised $20,000 to improve security and privacy in GNOME. I am
aware that the current board has finally formed a committee to determine
how to use the funds, but I would have expected this process to have
been completed by now, since it has been nearly two years since the
conclusion of the fundraising campaign.

Question for candidates currently on the board: do you believe you
handled this process appropriately, and if so, why? If not, what should
have been done better?

Michael

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Re: Minutes of the Board Meeting of January, 23th, 2015

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 7:53 AM, Magdalen Berns m.be...@thismagpie.com 
wrote:
p.s. Consider what Outreachy rhymes with, before finalising this as 
a name.


I'm not sure what it rhymes with but that caught my eye as well. The 
current name might be more effective. Good luck.
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Privacy campaign funds

[Michael Catanzaro]

Hi,

A while back we ran a $20K privacy campaign. A while later there was a 
discussion about what to do with the funds. Did we ever decide what to 
do with these?


Michael
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Re: Linking to non-free websites from gnome.org

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 12:35 PM, Christian Hergert 
christ...@hergert.me wrote:

The problem is that it takes *months* to prepare a proper crowdfunding
campaign. So if you didn't suggest crowdsupply to me back at the
hackfest, it was simply *too late* to be reasonably actionable 
(despite

that I might agree it would be a good idea).


Does crowdsupply accept software projects at all? Without reading all 
the terms and conditions, it looks to me like they just do hardware and 
manufactured goods.
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Re: Builder crowdsourcing banner on PGO

[Michael Catanzaro]

Hi,

On Fri, Jan 2, 2015 at 8:12 PM, Magdalen Berns m.be...@thismagpie.com 
wrote:
Hmm I am not so sure: The chip in your own card will be programmed 
with non-free software technically the transaction can't work unless 
the ATM is reading that. For the ATM to read your chip you are 
required you to physically connect your card's chip to the ATM's 
reader thus making an electronic circuit between your nonfree chip 
software and their non-free ATM software


If the nature of a philosophical question is found to depend on the 
formation or absence of an electronic circuit, is it still a 
philosophical question?


(Seriously -- the answer is relevant.)

This does not seem like proportionate response taking into account 
that the Builder campaign has time considerations and the developer 
needs to, like eat and stuff to keep on living (lest we forget that). 
How about we all agree to let Builder off the hook and have a policy 
discussion about linking to sites that use non-free software, for in 
future?


There is a wide gulf between the installation of nonfree software on a 
computer and the interpretation and compilation of nonfree Javascript 
by a web browser. On a technical level, I reject that that constitutes 
installation of software, but that's just semantics, so let's move 
on. On a philosophical level, the web site is a service, and we already 
agree that it's not our problem if the service provider runs nonfree 
software: but why is the question of whether it's the user's computer 
or the service provider's computer that executes nonfree code very 
interesting? This is a technical, implementation detail that's largely 
immaterial to the user experience. (Traditional free software respects 
the user and provides a significantly different user experience than 
proprietary software.) On a practical level, a campaign against 
obfuscated JS is completely doomed and can only hurt our efforts to 
attract users to free software. (How many people do you think would be 
using your distro here if it shipped IceCat instead of Firefox?) I 
suspect that the community of free software hackers eager to take on 
the entire Internet is dramatically smaller than those trying to 
maintain the free desktop.


Richard's analysis in this thread and the essays on his web site are 
good, insightful reading, and I appreciate his guidance and continued 
participation in foundation-list threads, but his campaign against 
browser JS seems much more radical to me than the rest of our 
community's already-radical beliefs*. So let's find out what others 
think before we jump the gun and assume we have a problem here: does 
anyone else here use IceCat or LibreJS and believe that donating to the 
Builder campaign via Indiegogo is unethical due to its use of 
obfuscated Javascipt? In the absence of further complaints, let's get 
that banner posted, please.


Michael

P.S. I'm CCing Christian since I'm frankly unsure if he's aware of this 
discussion.


* To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email
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Re: Call for OPW project ideas

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Sun, 2014-11-09 at 18:48 +, Magdalen Berns wrote:
 The challenges the OPW organisers face is in figuring out how to
 encourage projects and mentors to sign up and yet also protect GNOME
 from a potential lawsuit in the event that things go horribly wrong as
 a result of something that may not be GNOME's fault. 

I don't see much of a challenge. The wording under question is:

For only situations arising out of your gross negligence, recklessness
or intentional wrongdoing, you shall indemnify, defend, and hold
harmless GNOME, its officers, directors, and employees from any and all
claims, demands, damages, costs and liabilities, including reasonable
attorneys’ fees, made by any third party due to or arising out of your
participation in the Program; your Mentoring Activities (including
correspondence with the Participant or Participants, and modification of
any Participant’s source code or written materials); or your violation
of this Agreement.

This is really mundane: I agreed to a more restrictive indemnification
than this by simply reading CNN.com today. So has anybody who's ever
used Skype, or Flash, or Facebook. (Seriously, check the ToS of Facebook
or CNN, the two I bothered to check; they're very similar and include
the provision about attorneys' fees.) Or the Internet, really; I'm
surprised I didn't have to agree to indemnify my ISP, though maybe that
was part of my contract and I just forgot. Anybody can sue anybody for
anything, and I highly doubt being an OPW mentor will increase the
likelihood of my ending up in court.

See also:
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2014-September/msg00120.html

I'll be getting back to my code now.

Michael


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Re: Agenda for board meeting on September 26th

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Thu, 2014-10-02 at 17:00 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
 Thus, rather than finding the answers elsewhere and (possibly) raising
 _objections_ next week, I decided to raise _questions_ this week.  Can
 people interested in using Bountysource please find out the pertinent
 facts about it?

Hi,

Bountysource charges a 10% commission on each bounty. Section 6.5 of
their ToS state they can terminate [our] access to the service at any
time without cause or notice, so it would be inadvisable to keep any
more money in our Bountysource account than we're willing to lose.

Happy Thursday,

Michael

[1] https://www.bountysource.com/terms


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Re: Agenda for board meeting on September 26th

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Mon, 2014-09-29 at 17:34 +0100, Allan Day wrote:
 While Bountysource is interesting, I also think that we need to be
 rather careful about adopting it. 

On top of your concerns, their 10% commission is quite high, and their
terms of service are absurd [1], so I would advocate removing funds from
our Bountysource account relatively quickly.

But this account is actually for accepting, rather than posting,
bounties. According to Sri:

There hasn't been any plans for posting bounties on bugs.
ElementaryOS does this and since they extensively use the GNOME stack
they had some bounties on some bugs that were fixed by GNOME
foundation members.  They have been sitting in a Bountysource account.
He asked me if there was some way to transfer the money from the
bountysource account to the foundation.  Zana was going to create an
account for making that transfer and the action item was to put them
in touch with each other. [1]

[1]
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2014-September/msg00024.html


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Re: GNOME and Ubuntu GNOME

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Sat, 2014-09-27 at 20:24 +1000, Tim wrote:
 Some of the panels in 3.6 were actual separate applications from memory.

No, none of the panels in 3.6 were separate applications upstream; that
functionality was removed a long time ago (in 3.2?). You have some
downstream patches to add external applications like Deja Dup into the
control panel, but that's not what I'm talking about: you have EVERY
panel appearing as an application in the overview, making it
unnecessarily difficult to find real applications on the system and
diluting the effectiveness of the overview, after a behavior change in
some component (gnome-shell?) necessitated the addition of
NoDisplay=true; to the panel desktop files, and your
gnome-control-center does not have that change to the desktop files
because it is so old.

 That is a pretty minor issue, and its certainly not by our choice that 
 gnome-settings-daemon is outdated.

If the gnome-desktop version is your problem, I bet the Unity developers
would fork off a unity-desktop package for you. Otherwise, there wasn't
much point in unity-control-center and unity-settings-daemon, was there?

Anyway, that was just one more (admittedly minor) example to show the
trouble you can run into: you have a bug that you never noticed because
you mixed major versions of GNOME software. Whereas the versions of your
applications can probably vary without TOO much trouble, you should only
ever update core components like gnome-shell, gnome-settings-daemon, and
gnome-control-center at the same time. gnome-tweak-tool is another one
where something is likely to break if not upgraded in lockstep. These
communicate over unstable D-Bus interfaces and assume they're
communicating with the corresponding version of the other components.
Most things will work correctly, but something is likely to break.

It's also sad that Ubuntu GNOME users lack settings that are available
in other distros, such as control over notifications, search providers,
and all the privacy settings.

It's not really wise to vary applications' versions either, although
less risky. GTK+ has a few behavior changes each cycle that are
publicized in the release notes, and newer GNOME applications are
adapted to these behavior changes, but if your version of GTK+ is newer
than an application it will not have been changed yet. GTK+ 3.10 was
particularly problematic here. This can lead to interesting bugs that
are fixed in other distros but linger in Ubuntu GNOME, like dialogs that
are too wide, or boxes that aren't expanded so the UI is hidden (a
problem you seem to have in your downstream software updater, for
example).

It seems that Ubuntu GNOME has no control over the software versions
that it ships. That's a shame. Maybe your distro would be more
successful outside the Ubuntu project. If infrastructure is a concern, I
think the Tanglu developers would love to have more people working on
their GNOME product. Regardless, good luck.

Michael


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Re: GNOME and Ubuntu GNOME

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Fri, 2014-09-26 at 11:30 -0700, Jim Nelson wrote:
 For whatever it's worth, I had a lively discussion with Sebastien
 Bacher about this on ubuntu-desktop (regarding the main flavor of
 Ubuntu, not GNOME Ubuntu):
 
 
 https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2014-September/004539.html
 
 One note: When I wrote this, I wasn't aware that Ubuntu was shipping
 such a mix of versions, as Michael points out.

That's an interesting read. It sounds like they're primarily having
difficulty keeping their GTK+ theme up to date. The unresizable apps
problem is almost surely an incompatibility with the Ambiance theme's
window borders; maybe the Adwaita developers can help say what's wrong.
Header bars were admittedly a bad problem in GTK+ 3.10, but it sounds
like all of the remaining issues are downstream theme problems. CSD on
dialogs was a bad problem with GTK+ 3.12, but that should be fixed in
GTK+ 3.14.

It sounds like Ubuntu GNOME 14.10 will be mostly shipping with GNOME
3.10 apps, probably due to the pain of refreshing their impressive set
of downstream patches -- I count 45 patches for nautilus; even if most
of those are from upstream, it's no wonder they have trouble updating.
It would be misleading for Ubuntu GNOME to advertise GNOME 3.12 in 14.10
if it's going to ship nautilus, gedit, and epiphany 3.10. But it looks
like they're releasing with evince 3.14 alongside those. This is
difficult to make sense of

Michael


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Re: GNOME, Bounties and paid development [Was: Re: OPW; Where does the 500$ for each GSoC goes?]

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Thu, 2014-09-18 at 11:56 +0100, Allan Day wrote:
 The Elementary project claim to have had a lot of success with
 Bountysource [1].

Earlier in this thread, they suggested that their bounties are mostly
going out to regular Elementary developers who would have worked on
something else for Elementary anyway, instead of incentivizing
contributions from outsiders.


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Re: OPW; Where does the 500$ for each GSoC goes?

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Tue, 2014-09-16 at 15:22 +0200, Sébastien Wilmet wrote:
 - Writing a book, another actionable item.

My school told me to buy a Qt textbook when I was a freshman, even
though the class didn't involve Qt and we have zero Qt-related classes.
Simply having the book increased Qt's exposure. What if that was a GTK+
book instead?


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Re: OPW; Where does the 500$ for each GSoC goes?

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Tue, 2014-09-16 at 10:22 +0200, Christophe Fergeau wrote:
 So it's better to only have 15 students working on important things,
 rather than having these 15 students, plus 10 others working on less
 important things?

Nope! But maybe with a better selection process we could instead end up
with 20 students working on important things, with 5 working on less
important things, and hopefully 0 on projects that don't match GNOME's
priorities at all.

  Yes! Within reason; we don't want to push students to work on projects
  they're not interested in, but we also don't want to fund them to work
  on something that's largely tangential to our interests.
 
 Why not? If it's the preferred student project, if the maintainers of
 the associated module is ok with the project, isn't it good to have
 students learn about our platform in general (gtk+, ...) even though
 they are not working on a core GNOME module? We try to find some kind of
 balance between the various projects, we sometimes try to push students
 to work on core projects rather than the alternatives, but sometimes
 students are just not interested, or the core projects
 maintainers/contributors cannot mentor any/more students.

Well at the end of the day, the number of students we accept is going to
be based on how many Google allows us to, but I'd rather such projects
be prioritized lower than others.


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Re: Minutes of the Board meeting of August 29th, 2014

[Michael Catanzaro]

  Their terms of service [1] are also highly questionable. They reserve
  the right to take all the money in our account, or cancel our bounties
  without refunding our money, at any time and without any explanation,
  without cause or notice (section 6.5). Without cause seems like a
  pretty good place for us to draw a line
 
 Daniel Foré should probably be the one who we should alert.

OK, I've CCed Daniel to make sure he's aware about the issues with
Bountysource's ToS. It's probably not a huge risk, but it would not be
fun to be wrong about that

 We don't
 use it ourselves.  However, I am intrigued if people believe that we
 should put out bounties?  What I get a lot of times and you've seen
 this yourselves is that a lot of bugs are complex and takes a lot of
 intimate knowledge of the GTK+ or GNOME stack.  Would it be effective?
 
 sri

I think it could be effective, but it's something that would really
require strategic discussion to decide which bugs to place bounties on,
and how large the bounty. Presumably we would get better at this with
experience. I suspect that the most effective approach would be to
identify high-profile bugs that are not attracting sufficient developer
attention (e.g. the bad search experience in nautilus), and try to guess
the appropriate amount of money that will incentivize work on the bug.

Adam's $400 bounty for what appeared to be a simple crash actually
required digging into the webkitgtk+ sandboxing code, which basically
limited the bug to those who already have at least some webkit
experience. It did work in the end when it attracted my attention, but
that took a while.

My $150 bounty on the gnome-shell desktop background bug hasn't been
successful yet; it probably wasn't large enough to motivate anyone
unfamiliar with gnome-shell to look into the problem. I figured a
smaller amount of money would be appropriate since it's probably a
fairly simple issue and I pointed out a commit that I thought was wrong.
Maybe someone will work on it in the end, but I have a feeling it will
end up being solved by an experienced gnome-shell developer, and I guess
the bounty will probably not be significant motivation for doing so.

My $250 bounty on the gnome-shell calendar bug seems to have been just
right, though: that bug wasn't getting any attention and wouldn't have
been fixed without the bounty, and now it's very likely to be resolved
soon.


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Re: GUADEC registration

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Tue, 2014-07-22 at 16:41 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
 [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]]
 [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]]
 [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
 
 This repression against Bitcoin seems to be arbitrary and
 needs to be both investigated more and publicized more.
 Can someone put me in touch with those accountants and lawyers?
 
 In the mean time, it would be good to urge people to pay cash
 so as not to identify themselves.

I wouldn't say arbitrary (they're concerned about tax fraud), rather
wildly unreasonable. Oh well. Anyway, Kat, this is a question for you.

Happy Tuesday,

Michael


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Re: Agenda for board meeting on July 18th

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Fri, 2014-07-18 at 14:12 +0100, Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote:
 I would like to remind you that if you would like the board to discuss
 any issues at a meeting, you are welcome to request additions to the
 agenda for the following meeting at any time.

Could you please discuss how the new board will be publishing meeting
minutes; in particular, the timeliness of publication.

Thanks.


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Question for candidates: OEMs

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Thu, 2014-05-22 at 14:35 -0400, Jeff Fortin wrote:
 - Our somewhat nonexistent OEM story

Dell is currently shipping Ubuntu computers running Unity. Wouldn't it
be desirable to see a major OEM shipping GNOME as well? If so, what
steps do you believe GNOME, and the board in particular, should take to
achieve this goal?


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Re: About possible participation in Rest the Net campaign

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Tue, 2014-05-20 at 12:39 +0200, Oliver Propst wrote:
 This would include:
 Display a banner on GNOME.org, 5 June with link to
 https://www.resetthenet.org/
 Promote our participation on the campaign website
 Promote our our participation  and our work in this area in our own
 channels (gnome.org och twitter).
 
 On the last Engagement Team Meeting [4] we agreed that this something
 interesting. What do you foundation members think?  If there is no
 serious concerns I plan to ask the Board for approval.

I support joining this campaign, but their website says:

Pledge to add SSL, HSTS  PFS protection this year; it matters! Then,
on June 5th, run the splash screen to promote free software for
end-to-end encryption. Already rocking SSL  HSTS? Consider approaches
to end-to-end crypto.

Currently gnome.org does not even use HTTPS by default, let alone HSTS
or PFS. If we are planning to endorse this campaign, I think we should
also implement their recommendations.


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Re: About possible participation in Rest the Net campaign

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Wed, 2014-05-21 at 00:33 +0200, Andrea Veri wrote:
 Assuming gnome.org stands for www.gnome.org I'm asking you whether it
 makes sense to abuse the use of SSL even when not really needed?

From your response, I can see that you're concerned primarily with
protecting users' personal information. From that perspective, I'm
basically satisfied as long as our Bugzilla uses SSL, and it does, so
great!

In contrast, Reset the Net is interested in countering pervasive
surveillance, which really does require HTTPS/HSTS to be used on all
pages. Their goal is not to protect users' passwords, it's to prevent
the NSA from determining whether our users are visiting
http://www.gnome.org/gnome-3 or http://www.gnome.org/news/. It's an
encrypt the web campaign, and it'd be silly for GNOME to sign up if we
don't really mean it.

(It'd also be a bit silly to run a $2 privacy campaign and then not
participate in this, but I guess there are real disadvantages to
abusing SSL: increased power costs, correct?)


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Re: Question for candidates

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Mon, 2014-05-19 at 16:55 +0100, David King wrote:
 Finally, and only once the financial situation is more clear, the
 board 
 needs to find a new executive director. I anticipate that these
 goals, 
 which in some ways amount to getting the Foundation back on track
 will be challenging to meet over the next year.

I have a follow-up question (for David and incumbents): why do you want
(or not want) to hire a new executive director? What responsibilities do
you think the executive director role should entail? Can the foundation
afford to wait to hire a new executive director?

I'm asking because most of Karen's work was not highly-visible. I'm
aware that she worked on recruiting new advisory board members and spoke
at conferences, both of which seem important. But I'm sure there must be
more to the job that I am unaware of, to justify the significant
expense.


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Re: Question for candidates

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Mon, 2014-05-19 at 11:18 +0100, Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote:
 one of the options that I want the board to investigate
 is to tie in the executive director's wage and travel budget with
 adboard fees in such a way that the executive director will only be
 compensated up to a maximum of what the Foundation receives in adboard
 fees. This would free up some of the donations to be spent on
 sponsoring the Foundation members to attend events and do outreach.

I understand the value of performance-based bonuses, but this sounds
like it would create the possibility that a new company joins the
adboard and its fee goes entirely to the executive director.


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Re: Announcing GNOME's official GitHub mirror

[Michael Catanzaro]

This might be harmless if there was a way to disable pull requests, but
if we mirror repos on GitHub we have a responsibility to monitor for and
accept pull requests, otherwise potential contributors who are
unfamiliar with our development flow will be discouraged when their pull
requests sit unnoticed.

On Thu, 2013-08-15 at 12:26 +0300, אנטולי קרסנר wrote:
 Hello,
 
 GitHub indeed offers many features that Gnome's git web interface
 doesn't.

Yes, but we've disabled them all.  I really fail to see the point of
GitHub without its killer feature (pull requests); it seems to have no
advantages over our current infrastructure.


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Re: Announcing GNOME's official GitHub mirror

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Thu, 2013-08-15 at 11:03 +0200, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
 There's no intention to support pull requests or to depend in any way
 in this service, this is just a nice-to-have to serve the GitHub's
 community and user base.
My concern is that with no way to disable pull requests, potential
contributors will submit them and get discouraged when they are ignored.
This could be very confusing to a potential contributor who finds the
code on GitHub and isn't familiar with our development flow.  This might
outweigh the benefit of putting code on GitHub at all (since we seem to
have disabled all GitHub's useful features).

I do see pull request merges popping up [1] but I suppose those are
handled manually if the GitHub mirror is read-only?

[1] https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-music/log/


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