I'm going to reply to each of the points as I cross them, I hope I get them all. On Fri, 2003-05-30 at 03:02, Christian Rose wrote: > fre 2003-05-30 klockan 09.19 skrev Murray Cumming Comneon com: > > But I seem to have missed Iain's point anyway, though I would really like to > > know what he's suggesting. I have the same concerns about the Desktop > > release getting too big, but nobody has found a way to define it clearly > > yet. I do think 5th Toe should be taken more seriously so that we can show > > our appreciation of extra modules without putting them in Desktop. I'm not > > sure how to do that. > > I'm sure Fifth Toe would be taken more seriously as an official GNOME > release if: > > * The Fifth Toe website was hosted on gnome.org. Why on earth isn't it? Honestly because we would be hitting a moving target with the website. The Fifth Toe site is set up to make it very easy for us to build the releases and know what versions of what to get. www.gnome.org has been a moving target that jeff has been -valiantly- trying to get the site up and running. When he does and the web situation is more stable we'll poke on the system administrators to get the Fifth Toe site up on a gnome.org server. As it is, it'll happily sit on my colocated server and serve up the pages we have. > * The Fifth Toe website had some even remote similarities with other > gnome.org pages. Currently, I see none. Same answer. Even if they matched now, they wouldn't when the site ( soon ) changes. > * There was a detailed explanation of what Fifth Toe is and isn't on the > Fifth Toe website. Currently, that information is close to zero (one > sentence hidden somewhere). For example, mentioning that it is a > collection of useful GNOME software and not exclusively a staging area > for inclusion in core GNOME would help solve a common misunderstanding. We can add more explanations to the site. It's interesting that basically people are split into 2 groups when it comes to Fifth Toe. They either know what it is.. or they don't. Fewer seem to have a "grey area" idea of it. But this is certainly resolveable easily. > * There was a detailed explanation of inclusion criteria and what other > guidelines apply for candidate software. While I certainly don't believe > there should be as stringent criteria used as for inclusion in GNOME > core, I certainly believe there should be some criteria listed, if only > to give some confidence that it isn't just a random bunch of software > submitted, and that it has passed some level of suitability test. > One example of such criteria could be that the application needs to use > GNOME technologies. That's certainly not a very strict requirement, but > if listed it could give some level of confidence that not just any > application belongs here. This has been in flux and discussion. Typically we have been responding to individual developers requests when they submit their apps and they don't meet what we feel are the requirements to be in Fifth Toe. The bar for Fifth Toe is set pretty low intentionally. It basically should have a decent user interface, be stable or have a stable release, and have an author that responds to inquiries. > One example of a voluntary guideline could be that it's helpful if the > application does use GNOME resources such as GNOME cvs and GNOME > Bugzilla, to aid accessibility, usability, documentation, translation, > and QA efforts. While it certainly shouldn't be a requirement, it might > make a suitable guideline. So would also recommending the use of the HIG > be. > I have a big problem with requesting they use GNOME cvs and Bugzilla. While it is nice perhaps for -us- it incurs a cost that isn't always necessary on the application developer. Plus to get into cvs and bugzilla you have to have some sort of presence already etc. John Fleck has talked with me before about working on documentation for Fifth Toe applications and at some point we need to work on that. For now just getting applications going that are not "core" desktop applications has been an interesting challenge. > * There was some publically posted and coherent description of all > packages and information on why they have been included. Currently, > information about the packages seems to only be provided by the > submitters and is more often than not very lacking. Also, the grounds > for inclusion would be good to know, besides "someone submitted this". > I.e. a motivation of "the Foo application is one of the best frobnicator > applications available for GNOME, and it meets our other criteria and > most of our guidelines, therefore it's part of Fifth Toe" would be > better than "someone submitted this" or nothing at all. Currently, the > list of applications to an outside observer does look quite random > without any motivation. Well... if the maintainer themselves aren't motivated enough to add an excellent description of a package, why should the Fifth Toe coordinators feel obligated to write one for them? Even the I have personally built and run all but 2 applications on the Fifth Toe site and in the releases ( due to the fact I don't have a webcam I can't do camorama and the fm tuner card prevents me from doing the radio app ) we don't have the familarity with the applications the authors do and I don't feel that we should put up a description that is inaccurate. When a maintainer requests our help we do give it though. Grounds for inclusion do not apply to Fifth Toe like they do for the desktop release. Fifth Toe isn't about the "best" choice. Fifth Toe is where all software developers are welcome to build a cool GNOME app and we'll list it. The desktop release has a set of chosen, blessed specific apps and it -needs- to have them. Fifth Toe, does not. Before I get flamed for that comment, and I can hear it already "oh oh but you are promoting duplicate apps," we do try to funnel work on similar apps together and influence them where appropriate. > * There was some fifth-toe-list gnome org, where things like this and > the inclusion of packages in Fifth Toe could be discussed. desktop-devel-list is where we've held Fifth Toe discussion to date, and I think is entirely on topic and should continue to remain here. > > > Christian Something not mentioned here was the seeming "lack" of a releases. For this I think I would have 2 requests, basically give the coordinators more time to develop and get better at their own release processes, as those on the release team know this is NOT a trivial task. We're getting better at it, and currently I can only see improvement. We've been trying to get to a release every 2 months, with a target of a release every month. This is not easy but we WILL reach it. It just takes some time. The second is to understand that Fifth Toe isn't the same as the desktop release. There will never be a hard and fast freeze of applications etc etc. It just doesn't work that way and really, it shouldn't. Applications are taken on their individual merit. The "Fifth Toe" release is a way to promote and give kind of a "warm fuzzy" feeling for developers who write GNOME apps that aren't in the core desktop and in many cases, will never be in the desktop. Sincerely, Will LaShell
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