Announcing: Project Ridley

[Jonathan Blandford <jrb redhat com>]

Now that GTK+-2.8.0 is out, the GTK+ team would like to announce Project
Ridley.

GOALS:

The primary goal of Project Ridley is to cut down on the number of
problem libraries that are part of the GNOME platform.  We propose to do
this by moving functionality into GTK+, wherever it makes sense.  These
libraries are generally small, undermaintained, and buggy.  They have an
unclear purpose (such as libgnome and libgnomeui), are copied-and-pasted
around (such as libegg) or would benefit by being in GTK+ (libgnomeprint
and libgnomeprintui.)

We have been sending confusing messages to ISVs, free software and
otherwise, as to what they should be using to develop applications.  By
cleaning up these widgets and deprecating the libraries, we can make it
much simpler for developers.  To emphasize the 'consolidated platform'
message, we are considering to call the GTK+ version incorporating the
results of Project Ridley GTK+-3.0.

The secondary goal is to bring people currently working on the platform
together in a coordinated effort.  We would love to bring more people
into the GTK+ team and get people working on the platform again.

WHO SHOULD GET INVOLVED:

Anyone who's currently writing code for platform tasks.  As we're
targeting GTK+ for this work, it has to be written in C.

HOW TO GET INVOLVED:

We put up a a wiki page detailing the tasks we'd like to accomplish at:

http://live.gnome.org/ProjectRidley

A few of the widgets have people actively looking at them, though all
could use help.  There are tasks of all sizes, ranging from simple
cleanup and renaming of an existing widget to designing a cross-platform
printing api to writing a kick-ass, fully-functioning cairo-based
canvas.

We don't want to create a new list for this effort, and would like
followup mail to be sent to gtk-devel-list gnome org