Re: Proposing Gimmie applet for 2.22 -- check out 0.2.8

["Alex Graveley" <alex beatniksoftware com>]

Hi,

So Gimmie 0.2.8 was just released, and fixes many of the issues I
outlined in the proposal mail.  It's the most solid release yet, with
lots of testing and most major bugs fixed.  Check it out!

Details inline...

On Sep 24, 2007 12:27 PM, Alex Graveley <alex beatniksoftware com> wrote:
> Issues that I see:
>
>    * There has not been a new release since 0.2.7, in June.  A new
> release is brewing, and the Gimmie community is stepping up the
> release engineering around a solid 0.3 release.

Done =)

>    * Lack of dedicated maintainer resources.  Admittedly, I've been
> somewhat lax in my duties due to time pressures.  Luckily, several
> volunteers have stepped up recently offering to take the reins here
> for more reliable releasing.

Work is in progress on getting new maintainers up to speed, and I'm
confident I can find the requisite time needed.

>    * There is an experimental standalone panel version of Gimmie.
> This can be branched into a sub-project, or simply not installed by
> default.  I am *not* proposing to expose this panel alternative as
> part of GNOME.  There are many other interesting panel alternatives
> which are seeing a lot of love.

Left the standalone dock in for now, as no one weighed in either way
on hiding/removing it.

>    * Non-functional placeholders for future features should be removed
> (Flickr, Google Office, Friendster integration).

>    * GMail contact integration needs to be fixed or removed by default.

These are all removed for now.  Expect awesome support for all these
services and more in the 0.3 release.

>    * Ditto for Gaim/Pidgin online status setting.

Fixed.

>    * The Tomboy note category may not be useful to include by default.

No feedback as yet.

>    * There are a few experimental UI features that should be removed
> e.g. the timeline view.

Done.

>    * Saved email attachments only supports Thunderbird's downloads.rdf
> format.  I don't know if this feature can be supported with Evolution,
> and accordingly may need to be removed for now.

I believe Evo/EDS needs further support to support easy external
listing of attachments.

>    * .desktop change monitoring has been disabled due to crashes in
> the gmenu python bindings.  This may have been solved recently, or may
> require investigation into better alternatives.

Fixed.

>    * Preferences and Administration capplets are merged into a single
> Settings category.  This can easily be split into separate categories
> again, if people want to maintain compatibility with the existing
> menubar.

No feedback, but I think the split makes sense for transitional users.

>    * The "system" tab is labeled according to the OS's name, e.g.
> Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD.  If this is contentious, we can rename it to
> "Computer", "System", or "Gnome".

No feedback, remains as OS name for now.

>    * Different terms are used from the standard GNOME menubar:
> Applications->Programs, Preferences/Administration -> Settings.

No feedback so not changed.  Splitting Settings back into
Preferences/Administration would leave only the Applications/Programs
conflicting with the existing GNOME parlance.

>    * A few important crashers must be fixed[2]. See
> http://www.beatniksoftware.com/gimmie/Releases.

All fixed.

>    * Next-gen desktop systems are not yet used: Tracker/Beagle for
> searching, Telepathy for IM contacts, mugshot daemon for web service
> access.  I would love to see integration with these in future Gimmie
> releases, but they are not yet a standard part of GNOME.

There has been much talk of reusing Empathy, once it gets included in
Gnome, to handle a lot of the work of the IM contact management.  This
should allow for really tight People tab integration.

-Alex