Re: [Banshee-List] Google Summer of Code and Banshee

[Sandy Armstrong <sanfordarmstrong gmail com>]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 10:11 AM, Gabriel Burt <gabriel burt gmail com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 8:14 AM, David Nielsen <gnomeuser gmail com> wrote:
>
>> Neil's amazing Telepathy integration is now in BCE but depends on ndesk-dbus
>> from git and the ndesk-dbus maintainer Alp Toker hasn't apparently been
>> available for development and thus release management for a while.
<snip>
>
> Regarding the ndesk dep, it's actually bundled in BCE, so it's not
> that big of a deal.

Right, this is a very important point.  Neil bundled ndesk-dbus into
his extension after we explained to him that there was no plan for a
new ndesk-dbus release (at that time).  So the only real limiting
factor, once he released his extension, was having a new enough
version of Empathy and certain related libraries.  But from a GNOME
SoC point of view, requiring the latest upstream Empathy work was more
than acceptable.

> But, the forking and fragmentation caused by the
> lack of a ndesk-dbus release is a big deal for the wider ecosystem, I
> agree.  I believe Sandy Armstrong has talked to Alp and gotten
> permission to do a release; hopefully that'll be before too long, and
> we can maintain it as a community.

Alp and I have had some brief email contact about this, so I'm
confident saying that we'll be doing some ndesk-dbus releases this
year.  But I can't give any kind of schedule.  I plan to do a series
of unstable 0.7.x releases to encourage testing, and will do a stable
release "when it's ready".

My team at Novell is using a branch of ndesk-dbus master [0] in our
a11y work, so in that context there has been some QA on it.

But I want to caution that master has a *lot* of unfinished, untested,
and even unused code in it, so it could be some time before a new
stable release is possible.  I expect that once I've done a couple of
0.7.x releases, contributing won't be as frustrating, and interested
parties can help move the code along.

Cheers,
Sandy

[0] http://gitorious.org/dbus-sharp/dbus-sharp/commits/mono-a11y