GUADEC Hacking

[Nat Friedman <nat novell com>]

I propose that we have a one-day hackfest at GUADEC this year, focused
on desktop performance.

We should take a handful of common desktop operations that are not as
snappy or responsive as they should be, profile them, and optimize them.
We should also target known bloat in various applications and reduce it.

There is some useful information about excessive memory usage in the
wiki, of course: http://live.gnome.org/MemoryReduction

One of the operations I would like to see optimized is login speed.  It
takes a pretty long time to login on most GNOME desktops, and I think it
would be great if we could improve the login time (how long it takes
before icons appear on your desktop and you can use the menu or panel
launcher to launch an application).

Usually people get too drunk for hackfests to happen, or there are too
many talks, or everyone works on their own project and our efforts are
dissipated.  I think it would be nice to have the hacking room be used
for hacking at least part of the time, and for us to have a common goal.

If people like this idea, then we can create a wiki page and start
listing tasks now, so that there's a menu of tasks to choose from when
you get to Stuttgart.

(If GUADEC were next week, I would propose that the hackfest be based on
Matthew Thomas's excellent GNOME UI review (which you can and should
read at http://mpt.net.nz/).  But I don't think we should wait till
GUADEC to fix the problems that Matthew lists, so we should choose
another topic for the GUADEC hackfest.  

Then again, if GUADEC comes around and most of the issues Matthew lists
are not yet fixed, we should fix them.)

Nat