Re: release notes pimping [and some random thoughts on 2.6]

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Sat, 2003-08-02 at 17:12, John Fleck wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-07-28 at 21:12, John Fleck wrote:
> > Folks -
> > 
> > Last time 'round, the main theme of the release notes was "usability,
> > performance, appearance, and accessibility support". If we had a slogan,
> > it was a desktop that "just works". What is the dominant theme of the
> > 2.4? What should we be pimping here?
> > 
> 
> OK, so it's clear from the ensuing discussion that we have no Grand
> Shining Theme that I should be pimping ("Nearly Ready for the
> Enterprise" seems a bad slogan, and Luis is right - the word
> "Enterprise" shall never again cross my digital lips), so the release
> notes will focus on what this really is, which is a time-based release
> with a huge number of incremental improvements across the board, as well
> as a number of new gadgets added to the thing we call GNOME.

Dave[1] pointed out that it's not just new gadgets- we're a much more
'complete' desktop than we've ever been. We've finally got a web
browser, based on the most standards-compliant rendering widget
available. We've got some of the best accessibility tools available on
any platform, period. We've got a new character picker tool that's
really pretty best of breed, supporting the full range of unicode
characters. We've got a new calculator that (while still simple and
usable) also has powerful new functionality with 15 years (is that
number right?) of testing. Plus a number of nice touches, like a great
font browser, a high quality pdf viewer, and a very easy-to-use cd
burner.

So, I think Dave's point was that it's not just incremental
improvements, though those are important and lots of apps have them
(man, applets and games are /so/ much better in 2.4!). It's also the
massive new functionality that we're getting from our new components.

Not to overshadow 2.4, by the way, but just to get people thinking...
2.6 could really be a really, really awesome release. Just think, we
/could/ hit all of these if people have enough cycles to hack on them:

* a new file selector, hopefully integrated across all the key apps.
(Yes, I know we should have had it years ago. Still, I'm excited. ;) 
* new mime stuff (hopefully :) (jrb, teuf, is this feasible?)
* management bits- as much as I do hate the word 'enterprise', anything
that helps get more companies (and hence, eventually, more hackers) on
board is a good thing.
* full integration of Dave's printing work across the board, hopefully.
It's just too sweet in general not to use :) 
* with luck/lots of hard work/good timing, much better hardware support
via dbus and a hardware abstraction layer.

Plus the usual bouts of small fixes and improvements, which make HEAD a
pretty nice place to be right now and which will be even more true in
2.6. I hope. :) 

Anyway, just another two cents-
Luis 'pants are enterprise' Villa


[1] Who I'm increasingly beginning to believe is actually the wisest of
all the monkeys, and possibly also the least smelly :)