Minutes for release-team - 2002-12-11

[murrayc t-online de (Murray Cumming)]

Here are the minutes for last week's release-team meeting.

-- 
Murray Cumming
murray usa net
www.murrayc.com

Minutes for Gnome 2 release team meeting 2002-12-11
===================================================

Present:                        Apologies:

Murray Cumming                  Luis Villa  
Frederic Crozat                                     
Jeff Waugh (chairing)
Glynn Foster
Mikael Hallendal                      
Luis Villa
Jody Goldberg 
Karl Gaffney (10 mins late)                            


Actions:

  DONE: Luis needs to post the RSN (Real Soon Now) bug status report.

  DONE: Bring Mark McLoughlin into the release-team.

  PENDING: Jeff to update Modules list on developer.gnome.org's dotplan.
  => Jeff plans to do this real soon.

  PENDING: Jeff to install analog or webalyser on the box hosting
dotplan
  so we know what people are looking for/at/over.
  => No change: gnome-sysadmin is snowed under. Jeff will do it.

  PENDING: Jeff to create check-list of "things to do before major
  release" and maintain it so it's ready for 2.2.0.
  => No change: Jeff to post his list to the release-team list and then
     we can whack it into CVS or somewhere where everyone can see it. 

  PENDING: Jeff to ensure clear directions for Xft2 are in GNOME 2.1.x
  release notes.
  => Jeff plans to do this real soon.

  NEW: Send reminder that the UI Freeze happened a few days ago.

  NEW: Jeff to try changing install-module to get/enforce entries in
       NEWS files.

Decisions and discussion:
   
  * UI freeze

    There has been some UI-freeze breakage. For instance, there is a 
    new gstreamer configuration application in gnome-media. That 
    particular thing should be UI-reviewed ASAP (Glynn thinks that can 
    be done quickly)

    We should re-announce the UI freeze because people don't seem to 
    have got the message yet.

  * Changes to release team:

    Mark McLoughlin has joined the release-team, but can not be at  
    telephone meetings until April, due to his New Zealand time zone.
    But that will be useful for API-change approval requests.

  * Whether to ship libgnomeprint 2.0 as well as 2.2 in GNOME 2.2
  
    libgnomeprint 2.0 is a nasty mess that we don't want anybody to    
    use, but Gnumeric uses it now because it is API-stable. Gnumeric 
    expects to use libgnomeprint 2.2 instead if it becomes stable when 
    expected, with the GNOME 2.2. release. libgnomeprint 2.2 seems to   
    be much cleaner and maintainable than 2.0. Porting is very easy.

    On the one hand, it would be nice not to force people to upgrade, 
    even though libgnomeprint, as part of Desktop rather than Platform, 
    doesn't need to make any such guarranttee. But on the other hand, 
    that's why it wasn't in Desktop anyway.

    So we decided to supply only the 2.2 version in GNOME 2.2. No 
    major app will be using it in the near future anyway. 

    Note that evolution 1.2 uses libgnomeprint 1.4, not 2.0.

  * Improving the release announcements.

    The Mono announcements are full of stuff, but that's probably 
    because they are in an early development stage.

    People don't use their NEWS files (which should contain short 
    descriptions of user-visible changes) - they just upload the    
    tarballs. So it's hard for us to describe what has changed.

    Someone suggested that the ftp.gnome.org install-module script, 
    which puts each new tarball in the appropriate place, could extract 
    information from the NEWS file and complain if there is nothing 
    there. This might require some standard format for NEWS. Jeff will 
    play with that idea.

  * Meetings over the Christmas holidays.
    The wedndesday meetins fall on th 25th and 1st, Let's try. Fred 
    can't any from now until after 1st. Let's try, though the 25th 
    seems doubtful.
   
    There will be a call for tarballs for Monday, with a release on
    Wednesday.

  * Bugs status

    (Luis isn't here)

    Some people are worried about the theme control center. Glynn has 
    non-specific Terminal crashes, maybe an old version. Apparently the 
    vte terminal has problems with VI - mentioned in bugzilla.

Murray Cumming