Re: WGO : GNOME Software Map

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

<quote who="Gergely Nagy">

> Looks like a good start! Here are my thoughts:

Hey - this all gets into technical details very quickly, without much in the
way of problem definition before the fact. I've mentioned this before about
the proposed shift to projects.gnome.org, and wished I'd had time to write
something concrete about it already. (Yay for finally being home and out of
previous employment commitments! Maybe I can write something more thorough
soon.)

I think the big question that has to be answered here is: What kind of web
presence do we need to provide for GNOME based applications, and other GNOME
software suites? (The distinction here is essentially app vs. desktop vs.
platform.)

There's a few good places to look for inspiration. First up, look at all the
Novell-sponsored application sites (f-spot, beagle, banshee). They're pretty
simple and straight-forward, wiki-based, include information about how to
get involved in development, how to file bugs, how to get the software, news
about what's going on, etc. Secondly, as someone mentioned on this list only
a week or so ago, look at all the Apple product sites (also that you can get
info about almost any product using www.apple.com/<product>).

I think we need to get beyond the idea of "software map" or "projects" and
start thinking about how we can best serve the needs of our users - and our
software maintainers! Some things that we should think about can not even be
boiled down to cvs or bugzilla module name (and note that both of those can
be terribly inconsistent with what users know the software as), bigger stuff
like the desktop experience...

Off the top of my head, I think it is really important to have things like:

  www.gnome.org/desktop -> the GNOME desktop experience (the basic parts of
    the GNOME desktop experience such as nautilus, themes, how things work)
  
  www.gnome.org/platform -> the GNOME developer experience (tools and docs)
  
  www.gnome.org/embedded -> GNOME as an embedded platform (special case)
  
  www.gnome.org/evolution -> redirect to evolution site?

Now, what do we do in the case of projects that don't have their own site?
What are the user goals, the maintainer goals, and the project goals that
would go into designing these pages? Can we design a common user experience
or set some kind of standards? Is that desireable anyway? Is our approach
going to be different for different kinds of applications? (For example, I
don't think we'd approach Rhythmbox the same way we'd approach GDM, EoG or
gtk-doc - to use examples from the current project page.)

We've been running with a pretty outdated idea of what these things need to
be for a long time... Let's dump the old school concepts of "software map"
and "projects page" and attack the problem with a fresh point of view. I
hope these questions are helpful in that regard.

- Jeff

-- 
linux.conf.au 2007: Sydney, Australia           http://lca2007.linux.org.au/
 
     GDK (acronym): GNU's Not Unix Image Manipulation Program Tool-Kit
                                Drawing-Kit.