[no subject]

Paul

On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 9:31 AM, Calum Benson <Calum Benson sun com> wrote:

>
> On 22 Jul 2009, at 12:50, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote:
>
>  So I would like to ask the GNOME release team to please come forward
>> and clearly state that the future of GNOME is to be a linux desktop
>> system as opposed to a desktop system for any Unix-like system.
>>
>
> This is by no means an "official Sun response" to this proposal, just the
> thoughts of somebody who's worked on GNOME at Sun for the past 9 years or
> so...
>
> It goes without saying that I'd be disappointed if GNOME were to take any
> official Linux-only stance.  Sun has contributed a great deal to GNOME both
> technically and financially over the years, and although there aren't nearly
> as many familiar Sun faces on the GNOME mailing lists and IRC channels as
> there used to be (or, indeed, as I'd like), there's still a good-sized team
> of GNOME development and QA folks working here and contributing upstream as
> and when we can.  (FWIW, in addition to sponsoring the event again this
> year, a dozen or so of us made the trip to Gran Canaria this month, which,
> bar a couple of exceptions, is about the same or more as we've sent to every
> previous GUADEC.)
>
> That said, many of the Sun team do seem to spend more time than they ought
> to just to keep GNOME running on OpenSolaris on the various Sun platforms
> these days.  They often have to deal with various Linux-isms at a code or
> conceptual level, or with technologies that are coming late to Linux and are
> implemented completely differently from the equivalent used by Sun (e.g.
> RBAC v PolicyKit, Trusted OpenSolaris v SELinux), or with performance or
> scalability issues that don't affect the average Linux desktop or enterprise
> user, but that would make GNOME unusable on the hundreds of thousands[1] of
> Sun Ray thin clients out there.
>
> All that tends to leave us less time to make the larger-scale contributions
> that we used to make to GNOME and its related projects.  Historically, that
> included things like implementing multi-head support for gtk, designing and
> implementing the original accessibility framework, writing and reviewing
> large chunks of user documentation, collaborating on regular HIG updates,
> performing UI reviews and usability studies, etc.  All these things would
> probably have been gotten around to eventually, but at the very least, I
> think it's fair to say these sorts of contributions from the non-Linux side
> of the fence got GNOME to where it is today a good deal quicker than would
> otherwise have been the case.
>
> Now, there's no denying that until fairly recently, it was hard for most
> non-Sun contributors to even test their stuff on Solaris, so you could argue
> we're reaping what we sowed to some extent on that front.  Nowadays, though,
> OpenSolaris comes on a LiveCD and runs in VirtualBox or in a dual-boot
> scenario pretty much as well as any Linux distro.  So it shouldn't be all
> that hard to at least check once in a while that whatever you're working on
> is at least going to build, preferably run, and ideally function in an
> OpenSolaris environment[2].
>
> Anyway, if anything, I guess I'd argue that it's time to actually reinforce
> the notion that the GNOME desktop is intended for use on any Unix-like
> system, and to figure out how to better distribute the development and QA
> workload to make that happen, so that non-Linux contributors have more
> chance to make significant contributions upstream again instead of spending
> most of their time treading downstream water.
>
> Cheeri,
> Calum.
>
> [1] Okay, I don't actually have any idea how many Sun Ray clients are out
> there, but I'm guessing the order of magnitude is roughly correct.  If
> anything, it's probably an underestimate.
>
> [2]  Or indeed any other non-Linux environments that you might wish to
> explore to expand your technological horizons in your copious free time :)
>
> --
> CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
> mailto:calum benson sun com            OpenSolaris Desktop Team
> http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771
>
> Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems
>
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