Re: Planning for GNOME 3.0

[Sandy Armstrong <sanfordarmstrong gmail com>]

On 04/09/2009 07:56 PM, Dave Neary wrote:
> 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).

What confuses me is why this wasn't discussed using the same module 
proposal process we have used for a few years now.  Many shiny new 
things have been blocked for cycle after cycle due to issues or lack of 
consensus from the community (only to be included when they are deemed 
to be ready).  Why is a new window manager not subject to this process?

I sympathize with the desire to compete and innovate, but Dave's 
criticisms resonate with me: this doesn't feel like a community decision.

If this were a regular module proposal email, I'd have pointed out a few 
things that concern me:

 * What is the a11y story for gnome-shell and mutter?  Eiphany+Webkit 
has blocked on this for several cycles now.
 * What is the applet story for gnome-shell?  As the maintainer of a 
GNOME applet (Tomboy), I accept that there may be significant work to 
port our applet to a new infrastructure, but now I'm concerned that I 
will also need to *create* that infrastructure (because gnome-shell is 
basically being imposed upon us, and not going through the regular 
process, I can only assume that if there's no applet infrastructure, 
it's my fault for not caring enough to contribute one).
 * People keep hand-waving the hardware requirements issues, but didn't 
Federico's deployment survey [0] show that almost half of all GNOME 
deployments are done via thin clients?  We can't just pretend that we're 
not going to have to continue supporting these users.

And lastly, until all of these issues are resolved, I am very concerned 
about the inevitable differences (and tensions) between distros and 
upstream GNOME for the next few years.  Do we really want this to be 
like KDE, where some distros ship 3.x, some ship 4.x, and some ship both 
(then the user can only blame themselves for making the wrong choice, 
right?)?

Perhaps I'm overly-conservative, but I am really quite worried about the 
state of GNOME for the next few years.

That being said, I am glad to see a vibrant community growing around 
gnome-shell, and sincerely hope that they can work through these issues 
before 2.28.  If everything works out perfectly, maybe my concerns will 
be shown to have been foolish.  But normally when we make these 
decisions, we don't pretend we can predict the future.

Best,
Sandy

[0] http://www.gnome.org/~federico/docs/gnome-deployments-2006/index.html