GNOME 3.0 in September 2010

[Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org>]

GNOME 3.0 will be released in September 2010, and in the meantime, we
will release GNOME 2.30 in March 2010, continuing our long-standing
tradition of six-months releases.

Thanks to the input from the community, we were able to draw a clear
picture of where we stand today and where we will be next March. As
mentioned in the GNOME 3.0 planning document [1], the release date for
3.0 was not set in stone: while we're using a strict schedule that
allows us to release GNOME every six months, GNOME is above all using
quality-based release engineering. That's why our community wants GNOME
3.0 to be fully working for users and why we believe September is more
appropriate.

Note that this release date for 3.0 doesn't mean that 2.30 will be less
stable than usual. On the contrary, this will help us integrate the
changes that are ready for 2.30, while leaving the parts that are still
rough on the edges outside of GNOME, as used daily by our users, until
after 2.30 is out. This will solidify both our 2.30 and 3.0 releases.

The idea of doing GNOME 3.0 was first seriously discussed in 2008,
before focus areas were defined in 2009, alongside a plan to reach
3.0. Those focus areas include revamping the user experience,
streamlining the platform and improving the promotion of GNOME. Compared
to GNOME 3.0, GNOME 2.30 will see the iterative improvements and bug
fixes that people have now come to expect from our 2.x branch, in
addition to some preliminary work needed for GNOME 3.0.

The GNOME 3.0 planning document was answered by the community with a
tremendous amount of work, with various teams taking the opportunity to
set their own goals for 3.0. Such goals range from modernizing part of
our stack to proposing new UI models for our desktop: those broad
changes show our ambition to always offer the best to developers and
users, and this make our path to GNOME 3.0 most exciting!

Let's make 2010 a fantastic year for GNOME!

Vincent

[1] http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/Plan

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