Re: Planning for GNOME 3.0

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi Vincent,

Vincent Untz wrote:
> (generally speaking, I believe all release team meetings have public
> minutes since at least a few years, and the release team mailing list is
> used most 99% of the time for communication)

Thanks for the info and the link, Vincent. I was not aware that the
release team archives were public, since the membership is, in theory,
restricted to the release team. I would never have thought to follow r-t
to follow discussions abpout the future direction of GNOME (it seems to
me that d-d-l *should* be serving that purpose, and if it can't for some
reason, that's a problem that we need to address).

I also noted this line at the top of Andre's (now public) wiki page on
2.99 release plans at http://live.gnome.org/AndreKlapper/299: "Schedule
draft (non-public only to avoid bike shed discussions)".

This echos something that was said some time ago by the authors of the
slab, as a justification for working on it behind closed doors &
releasing it only when finished, and I don't think it's a valid reason
for going behind closed doors. We should not be afraid of community
discussion of the future of the project. I have confidence in the
release team's ability to filter discussion & announce decisions, as you
do for module additions in the release sets.

Let me repeat, I don't think this is a bad plan, but I don't think that
it's healthy to have the release team just come out with this plan with
no input or consultation period. This is exactly the same type of
process which I encouraged the GTK+ team to follow, and I was delighted
to see Tim's mail earlier this week which came out with a roadmap, but
was also framed as a call for contributions and comment.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org