Re: Gnome 2 infinity and beyond [was Re: Tango and 2.16]

[Andrew Sobala <aes gnome org>]

Alan Horkan wrote:
> I put serious thought into the fact that Gnome 3.0 would be useful way to
> highlight all the progress that has been made.  A major version number
> change is also of some marketing value.
>   

Look at the desktop. It's got incredibly amazing since the times of 
GNOME 2.2, but it's still very much a GNOME two series desktop.

There are ideas for what people want from a GNOME 3.0 desktop, and these 
Topaz-related include:

* Indexing support across the whole desktop. Probably provided by 
beagle. Beagle can query document metadata too.
[ some of this is starting to appear: deskbar, nautilus ]
* Documents and people as first class objects, rather than applications, 
files and windows. [see also: beagle, galago. ] [this idea seems to be 
one with the most buy in ]
* New panel applets that can be written as easily as notification area 
doodads. ie. without bonobo.
* Networking. Really easy peer to peer? Share files with anyone nearby? 
Or even collaborative document creation? (is iFolder relevant for some 
of these?)
* Multimedia. (personal note: kick whatever it is that's still making my 
desktop sounds laggy. I'm going to completely arbitrarily blame esd on 
no evidence whatsoever.)
* Cairo/Xgl/compiz goodness wherever appropriate

I've picked out the biggest ideas; there's much more than this on the Wiki.

And it can *all* be done *now.* That's the point. It's big. It's hard. 
It's a lot of work. But there's nothing to stop any of these ideas being 
implemented. And when we have the code to make this all work, we can 
build something new: the next generation desktop, and call it GNOME 3.0. 
But we can't keep doing "little" point-release things and pass a future 
point-release off as GNOME 3.0 - it doesn't work like that. We'd be 
crucified.

As a separate issue, people have got confused about the API-stability 
guarantee for the 2.0 series. These were never intended to make GNOME 
3.0 a chance to break API for the hell of it; they were a guarantee that 
we definitely would *not* be breaking API for a good long time - until 
we got our asses in gear about GNOME 3.0.

When GNOME 3.0 comes out, we can deprecate/delete API as we feel fit. I 
don't think large-scale API breakage is a good idea, and it sounds like 
the GTK+ team will not be breaking API with GTK+ 3.0. However, we are 
allowed to reorganise the platform if we need to. This doesn't define 
GNOME 3.0, though.

So let's get coding.

--
Andrew

(This e-mail is mine and doesn't necessarily represent other people's 
opinions, specifically any consensus of the GNOME Foundation members, 
although I'd be right chuffed if it did.)