Hi, Quim! Thanks for the summery. I suggest to rename the page http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/SoftwareMap, then. In fact, after reading the page again, Murray asked the most relevant question right in the beginning: What is the purpose of the list? I'm was just asking the same question: What's the audience and who will benefit from reading this 'software map'? -- especially if it's going to become lots of app pages that basically either copy the project homepages or constitute a new gnomefiles or do something in between. Obviously, there's no good answer to the question so we should re-consider it. Let me add two additional notes for consideration: Mentioning certain projects on wgo ---------------------------------- Those who actually read older material may note that I've planned indeed a page called 'products' in my old draft of the wgo structure: wgo > About > Products. I attached my draft for the page (HTML only). I just mention it because I think it's easier to talk about mockups or drafts. Such a page could have also been seperated into categories like 'Desktop', 'Embedded', and 'Development platform'. But there was even room for another level, so we could have, for example, wgo/about/products/desktop/applications.html and several other pages in there, explaining different aspects of 'desktop' and 'embedded' and so. I think, such a 'list' makes sense. And one should note that the old draft of the wgo structure had things like a tour so most people are probably happy about the tour already. There was just one additional list of projects, namely those that constitute the development platform -- available under wgo > development > architecture IIRC. What other lists do we need? ---------------------------- (1) Is there any need to bother wgo visitors with a complete list of 'official' GNOME software? You called it the "components of the desktop". I don't think so. IMHO, users simply expect that any relevant desktop (or better: operating system in their language) has something like a calculator or a window manager (even if they don't know what a window manager is). They just want to know about the major (unexpected) benefits, unique selling propositions, etc. -- however you like to call it. This was already present in the above draft. The only people who may be interested in a list of official components (and I'm not even sure if they really are) are distributions. However, the release team hopefully provides such a list somewhere, and links to it from the release pages on live.gnome.org. (2) Do we need a list what projects are hosted on GNOME infrastructure? Yes, of course. This is already available under http://www.gnome.org/projects/ and such a page would probably constitute the homepage of projects.gnome.org provided it gets created. Do we need to bother wgo visitors with a list of hosted projects? No, I don't think so. The only people interested will be developers and they can deal with the issue that the list adress could be different to wgo. (3) Do we need a list what projects are 'GNOME applications'? No, I don't think so. Why that? On the one hand, such a list assumes that anybody cares what GNOME as an institution says. We are far from such a position, IHMO. (Example: If I need Open Office, I don't mind whether some geeks call it a 'GNOME application' or not). On the other hand, such a list is exclusive: Projects that don't make it -- but somehow hoped to make it --, might get offended. (And rightly so, IHMO -- just as an example: our usuablilty guys so far didn't do much to educate people outside of the usability mailing list; it's not a surprise that outside projects don't bother much about our usability guidelines.) If we *really* want to promote GNOMEiness among third-party projects we should start a yearly competition (say: with the annoucement during GUADEC and an official press release) and give prices for the best third-party project(s) of the year of so. Did I miss any potential list of projects that was mentioned in the discussion? Hopefully not. ;-) Additionally, I'd like to suggest that we should not establish a policy of creating a "project page" on wgo if the project lacks a homepage (Example: Pessulus) -- we should try to convince the project to make a homepage, help them doing so, and link the result if necessary. Cheers, ClausTitle: GNOME: The Free Software Desktop Project
While a GNOME desktop appears as a single unity to most users, it really consists of a number of applications, utilities, and libraries. We can list just the most important ones here.
GNOME comes with several applications for your everyday needs. You can find additional third-party software from other software directories.
Learn once, use often: GNOME delivers cross-platform tools that work across several Linux distributions.
You're interested to build your own applications? GNOME comes with lots of libraries to make it easier for you. With bindings to all major programming languages, and lots of third-party application build with them, you can rely on the continuous improvement of all of GNOME's base libraries.
A full list of projects hosted on the GNOME servers is available. Note that some entries are kept for historical reasons.