Let's look into the future (aka "The ``Martin is back'' mail")

[Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org>]

Hi guys,

before I leave to that big party tonight, I think it's time to write
a little "Martin is back" mail first :-)

I read most of the discussions on g-h and gnome-2-0-list yesterday, but
I'll answer tomorrow or on Saturday. Some construction workers started to
make a lot of noise in front of my window at 6:30 am this morning, so I need
to get some sleep before I go to the party ...

However, I think we need to discuss a few things to avoid that such
things happen again in future:

* libgnome(ui) maintainance

  I think we have to options here:

  a) we declare libgnome and libgnomeui as officially dead

  b) we find a good maintainer for it

  Look at for instance Bonobo, it's 100% clear that Michael is its maintainer
  and nobody will ever doubt this. IMHO we need the same for libgnome(ui), so
  whoever is maintaining it, it needs to be clear that he/she is the maintainer
  and nobody else.

  However, let's forget this whole flamewar and assume that the last two weeks
  simply did not happen. And to avoid yet another flamewar, if there's anyone
  out there who still doubts that I'm the libgnome(ui) maintainer, speak up
  now or keep your mouth shut until we have that damn thing released.

* GNOME 2 release coordination

  Dudes, of course it'd be very foolish to run away just because of some
  silly and unproductive flamewar. But please, let's avoid that this ever
  happens again. And now we can all be happy and have some beer or whatever
  other drink tonight (/me prefers some Koelsch :-)) - GNOME 2.0 has its
  release coordinator back :-)

* The API freeze date

  Assuming the I'm still release coordinator, the new API freeze date is now
  Wednesday August 15th or still July 32nd if we still make it until that date.

  Before we lost two weeks in this flamewar, I was almost confident that we
  could actually make it until the July 31st freeze, so add the two wasted
  weeks and you'll get Aug 15th.

  However, IMO being two weeks behind schedule isn't such a big problem - and
  if we now all start working together and maybe even get a few more people
  hacking, we may even make it until that July 31st date (find 3 more people
  who're hacking at least a few hours each week and in a month we're on
  schedule again).

  So we should at least try hard to do it until July 31st, with a few more
  people this is actually possible.

  Before we got disrupted, I started to post some TODO items - I'll continue
  with them this weekend.


Ok, that's it for the moment, it's getting party time ....

-- 
Martin Baulig
martin gnome org (private)
baulig suse de (work)