Re: Old versions of GNOME [was: Re: gtk 2.8 for gnome 2.12]

[Glynn Foster <Glynn Foster Sun COM>]

Heya,

> Please bear with me along the following rant.

Okay, so this rant covers a lot of ground, but I have specific comments
from a Sun perspective -

o As a Sun developer, I'd much rather the community focus on
  churning out the next release of GNOME. Which is pretty much what
  the average hacker wants to do, right - be innovative, develop 
  new features and generally get the desktop moving forward. Bug fixing
  gets boring, and bug fixing on stable branches even more so ;)

o I think it should be up to the various distributions to put their
  bug fixing patches upstream, and onto the branches ASAP - so that
  other distributions can also use them. Let's face it - there's 
  no value add in bug fixes, and if they don't get pushed upstream,
  it makes GNOME look bad rather than other distributions. I'd 
  very much welcome a 'free for all' on the stable branches, past
  the 2 or 3 official releases we do.

o I'm trying to push a change in development process within Sun, so
  that we can concentrate our core development on HEAD as much as 
  possible. We've been kicking this around internally for the past
  couple of years, and now with our focus on OpenSolaris, I think it 
  should be more feasible to do than previously. As an added bonus,
  we hope to be able to throw QA resources into that as well. All
  this is going to take time though, and won't happen overnight.


Glynn