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

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sat, Aug 02, 2003 at 06:10:00PM -0400, Luis Villa wrote: 
> Not to overshadow 2.4, by the way, but just to get people thinking...
> 2.6 could really be a really, really awesome release.

2.6 is going to be the one where we finally cover every major "must
have" I think.  With Longhorn and OS X pushing the envelope, of course
more things will become "must have" ;-)

One cool thing is that we're *still* driving toward decreased resource
usage; lots of library bloat is becoming less and less necessary 
as features move lower in the stack and are more widely shared.

Another thing that seems to be going well is that we have good solid
codebases for most of the desktop components, so we're constantly
building up improvements instead of doing rewrite breakage.

> Just think, we
> /could/ hit all of these if people have enough cycles to hack on them:

More volunteers needed! 

> * with luck/lots of hard work/good timing, much better hardware support
> via dbus and a hardware abstraction layer.

We need a volunteer to make this happen.
http://ometer.com/hardware.html for those who haven't seen it; there's
a plan, there's the infrastructure, now we need a mastermind.

And don't forget some of my favorite issues ;-)
(http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2003-February/msg00048.html)

 - fix the freaking session manager!
   (http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2003-April/msg00090.html,
   at guadec Ben Jansens and Billy Biggs said they'd check this out 
   so I'm hopeful)
 - desktop sharing/remoting including thin client support
   (http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-December/msg00221.html)
 - fix up the launcher editor dialog, it bites last I looked
 - investigate making panel and desktop background the same kind 
   of container to unify user model
   (http://www.gnome.org/~gman/nils-gnome/G2-next/objects.html)
 - preferred applications spec that works cross-desktop
   (easier if we have cross-desktop IPC system like dbus)
 - unify notification icons and applets into a single cross-desktop 
   embeddable object spec; and allow embedding them in desktop
   background etc., not just panel
 - revert/undo/defaults button in prefs dialogs
 - sanitize prefs menu again, consider adding prefs shell 
   like XD2 one or something
 - menu spec hell that I'm working on, someone please 
   take over...
 - Cairo (was Xr) vector graphics (needs someone to write printing 
   backend; then we can do really cool stuff).
 - ensure you don't need to log in as root (e.g. way to manage 
   files without being root)
 - password management for samba, etc.
 - implement all the startup notification stuff to keep newly-opened 
   windows from ever stealing focus 
   (see e.g.
   http://mail.gnome.org/archives/wm-spec-list/2003-May/msg00013.html)
 - fix the bugs that weren't fixed for 2.4
 - etc. ;-)

Lots of project ideas in the above list for someone that wants to get
involved...

Havoc