Re: Proposed: Rhythmbox

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Mon, 2004-01-05 at 08:17, Mike Hearn wrote:
> For all the words she uses, I think Eugenia has some good points. If you
> start saying "oh well the distro will include it anyway" then there's
> little point in having a desktop release at all.

My take is the desktop release is a _developer tool_ so that we can
freeze and integration test one logical subcomponent/module of the OS,
namely the desktop environment, and then make available a set of source
code known to work together. We also try to make this release
self-contained and buildable enough that testers can test and the tech
savvy can build it for their own use.

There's then an additional release cycle with freezes and integration
testing that brings together the large grained modules such as X, Linux,
GNOME, and so forth. This work is done by distributions at the moment.

Think of a tree with individual tarballs at the leaves, and then we
bring those into GNOME, and then GNOME in turn becomes a part of a
larger entity which is made available to end users.

There is some sense that the release is a recommendation or blessing,
but I'd really like to downplay that especially if/when it interferes
with its function as a development tool.

Havoc