Re: Need Leadership

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Jason:

> We need to tap in to the wave of energy generated by the The Thread on
> Planet Gnome. Already, it's apparent that the fervor that surrounded it has
> started to dwindle. A ton of interesting ideas were thrown out and lot of
> belly-aching about no one taking responsibility for making it happen was
> heard.

That is not quite true.  There is a lot going on to make the GNOME
Developer Platform more rich and stable, making GNOME a richer
development platform for third-party ISV's.  As GNOME slowly develops
more and more interest from third-party ISV's (such as Adobe and Real)
the platform becomes more usable to a wider audience.

Some examples currently underway include gail merging into GTK+,
accessibility moving away from ORBit2 and towards D-Bus, gvfs replacing
gnome-vfs, and so on.  This is in relation to Project Ridley [1].

So, there is a lot of digging in the trenches to prepare GNOME for
taking things to the next level, I think.

> It's clear from The Thread that we need to "Get Our House In Order". There's
> nearly universal agreement that Gnome lacks leadership in the sense that
> there's someone that sets release goals.
>
> In my opinion, whatever "The Next-Gen Gnome" is, it isn't going to happen
> until we really, really have a deep maintenance cycle going on here. That
> means fixing a Handful of Giant Warts on our maintenance process:

In addition to having a richer developer platform, it is probably
necessary for GNOME to get some sort of a face-lift in order to warrant
next generation attention.  This probably would require some addition of
needed functionality, and some theming/visual elements.  Compiz,
Clutter, and/or pigment could be a part of this.  Work seems to be
fairly active in these areas.

> 1. DVCS needs to happen; now. It's time. The number of people using a DVCS
> frontend to circumvent the insanity of SVN continues to grow. In that vein,
> we need to a) debate the One True DVCS for Gnome, b) delinate the work that
> needs to be done to get there and set a timeframe, and c) find the man power
> to do it.

This would have little impact on end-users, I think.

> 2. The Giant Rift in the Gnome community over Mono has to end. I hate Mono
> as much as the next guy but it's quite apparent now that some really cool
> stuff with financial backing from Big Linux Distributor is not going away:
> Gnome Main Menu, Banshee, F-Spot, Beagle, Tomboy, etc. We have to get rid of
> the rift and bring the two diverging communities back together. Whatever
> damage that might incur in the minds of the Slashdot crowd has already been
> done--Gnome is perceived (rightly or wrongly) to be largley 'infested with
> Mono' in the minds of our critics. We cannot capitulate on this to appease a
> vocal minority of users that detest Mono. It's obvious it's not going away
> and, with a trivial amount of work, we can mend the rift by including the
> afore-mentioned mondules in our official releases. Let's just do it and move
> on with our lives.

Solaris doesn't distribute with Mono, but I wouldn't say anybody at Sun
detests Mono.  Mono is great!  Aside from causing some distros to have
slightly different applications (e.g. Beagle versus MetaTracker), I
do not think whether Mono is used on a given distro causes end-users
much grief.

In some ways, I think the fact that distros differentiate themselves a
bit is probably a good thing.  It gives people some choices to consider
when they pick a distro.

> 3. Marketing to developers must get ramped up; we agree that we need a new
> generation of awesome developers to bring new ideas and blood in to our
> process. A number of our Gnome modules are in "barely maintained" mode. With
> new blood, we can reinvigorate 2.x while looking to the future. And I've
> volunteer for this one in the form of 15 minute screen casts. However, it
> needs web hosting space. And that needs Gnome resources. What do we have to
> do to make this hosting happen? What else can we do to get more developers?

The GNOME project has a marketing-list, and you are right that there 
does not seem to be enough volunteers or energy to do a lot of exciting
things.  If you, or anybody has an interest, I'd get involved.

I think its good to discuss what sort of features we should consider in
taking GNOME to the next generation, so I appreciate your suggestions.

Brian

[1] http://live.gnome.org/ProjectRidley