Where's all the movement?

[mawarkus t-online de (Matthias Warkus)]

I understand that a lot of development is done on Gnome. After all,
people work for this full-time. Nevertheless, the overall face and
features of Gnome haven't changed much for me in the last few weeks
and months.

Lots of plans I heard of seem to have been forgot. Not long ago, there
was talk of Gnome file dialogs, using GMC as a Bonobo component to do
a nice icon view in open dialogs and such. But all that seems to have
come to a standstill. Surely that's because GMC development is not a
priority anymore, surely it's because we're moving to that new file
manager that Miguel has promised?

But where is it?

Then, there was talk of splitting the functionality of gmc into two
parts, like kfm and krootwm do it in KDE. Of course, this, too has
been put off. We're waiting for the new file manager, after all. That
new file manager seems to be (I'm hypothesising) waiting for Bonobo.

Stuff like that... most of the hacking activity seems to go into
Bonobo. Perhaps we'll make breakthroughs if Bonobo finally becomes
what it's intended to be.

Then, a lot of hot air has been created over the soon-to-be GTK window
manager for Gnome. Is there actually any effort creating any code
which could be of any use soon, or is this window manager thing simply
too fragmented?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not impatient. Gnome at the moment is already
very, very cool. But there was so much talk about so many things which
look now like they've gone under in a way. The problem is information,
perhaps. There are so many developers busy all day. But it simply
doesn't get through to me what they are doing.

The GNOME Summary is a great institution and has bettered this.
Nevertheless, it basically is a newsletter telling me who has done CVS
commits and who has posted what to the mailing list and what has
changed on the Web page -- it doesn't give me any additional
information about where we are on the road map and what is moving
where.

GNOME surely moves. I'd like to know which part of it moves, though,
as I'd like to be there as a tester and as a translator.

mawa
-- 
Warkus' Law of non-24/7 workstation operation:
1. When you boot your workstation in a hurry, at least one filesystem
   will force an fsck.
2. The filesystems checked will always be the largest ones.