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

[Andrew Sobala <aes gnome org>]

Dan Winship wrote:
> Andrew Sobala wrote:
>   
> > 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.
> >     
>
> Yes, we can do it now, and people *are* doing it now. And each cool new
> feature will get added to some release as it becomes available. And when
> the last feature on that list gets committed to CVS, and Alan says "OK,
> NOW can we call it 3.0?", people will say "Oh, come on! How can we call
> this release 3.0? It's clearly just an incremental improvement over 2.38!"
>   
<snip>
> The only way this is going to happen again is if there is similarly
> massive infrastructural change, and I don't see that happening.

I think if everything we want to do with GNOME can be implemented 
incrementally, you're absolutely right. However, some of the ideas for 
Topaz (I'm thinking particularly of "real first class objects" here) 
would seem to involve such a huge infrastructural change. I accept that 
I could well be wrong about that, though.

--
Andrew