Re: Generating excitement in GNOME

["Lucas Rocha" <lucasr gnome org>]

Hei John!

Some questions:

- How is this Sneak Peek thing different from what we have now? We can
always develop experimental things and get feedback from community as
the things move on. If they are relevant and get enough support, they
will naturally get into GNOME I guess. Of course there are exceptions.
:-P

- Is it just a visibility boost for those "cool" modules?

- What would change in practice for the maintainers of the "Sneak Peek" modules?

- Is there anything blocking them to have better integration with GNOME?

I like the general idea of bringing more (structured) visibility to
those "cool stuff" that have been flowing around[1] GNOME but I think
I didn't get the point of your idea. Also, some of those softwares
overlap in functionality so it will be hard to provide something
usable or consistent from this suite (is it proposed as a suite btw?
or something like lab projects?)

As an additional (and necessary) action, what I would like to see is
objective, practical and focused groups proposing ways/plans/roadmaps
to integrate those things in GNOME. If we don't do this, those cool
things will stay in this parallel world forever.

Cheers!

--lucasr


2007/4/25, John (J5) Palmieri <johnp redhat com>:
> Recent blog posts I did:
>
> http://www.j5live.com/?p=355
> http://www.j5live.com/?p=356
>
> gave some people the impression that I was against excitement in GNOME.
> That sentiment could not be further from the truth.  In fact I see and
> participate in exciting project every day.  However being a mature
> project we need to weigh the new and exciting with the need to support
> stability and time tested technology.
>
> The exciting stuff is happening all around us it is just that it is not
> publicized and much of it takes a long term view that does not fit well
> into our time based releases.  It is correct that they stay this way so
> that they can move along, experimenting without the heavy constraints
> that becoming part of release puts on them.
>
> After talking with the release team to see if there are any objections,
> as it is the release team that will be fielding the work that this
> proposal will generate, we now open it up for comment to the rest of the
> GNOME developer community.  We wish to start a new "Sneak Peek" release
> module.  This module will contain API's and applications which are in
> the process of being developed for a future release of GNOME but are not
> yet API stable or in a form that is full acceptable for the GNOME
> release process.  Examples may be a fully integrated Network Manager,
> Telepathy, Gimme, Big Board, Beagle, and Tracker.
>
> The current proposal for rules are that the project is in a usable
> state, seeing active development, moving towards a time based release,
> and having a dogfoodable upstream repository.  On top of that project
> members should be open to advice from the GNOME community and recognize
> that being part of the module does not grantee inclusion in GNOME at
> some later date.
>
> This gives project the room to experiment while letting other developers
> keep an eye on the future directions GNOME may go in.  It is my
> prediction, seeing the way this sort of ecosystem bloomed with
> freedesktop modules and GNOME, that there will be early adopters who
> will port their apps to work with the newer technologies even before
> API's are frozen and projects make it into the GNOME releases.  This
> will allow the projects themselves to gain real world feedback and allow
> GNOME to move faster by having applications already utilizing the
> technologies before they are accepted.
>
> This proposal is now open to comments and adjustments.
>
> --
> John (J5) Palmieri <johnp redhat com>
>
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