Minutes of the GNOME Foundation Board meeting 20 February 2001

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Minutes of GNOME Foundation Board meeting - 20 February 2001
------------------------------------------------------------

Present: Miguel de Icaza, Federico Mena, John Heard, Havoc Pennington, 
Owen Taylor, Maciej Stachowiak, Bart Decrem, Dan Mueth

Regrets: Daniel Viellard, Jim Gettys

Absent: Raph Levien

Chairing: Havoc

Minutes: Owen  [ Substituting for Daniel, and probably 
                 not up to usual quality. ]


New Action Items
================

 - Miguel to send summary of Ximian gnome-libs meeting
   to gnome-hackers

 - Owen and Havoc to write down details for GNOME-2.0
   preview packages to go along with GNOME-1.4.
   One of them to join next gnome-1.4 release meeting.

 - Dan and Bart to work with Martin in making sure that
   companies have a clear idea what sponsorship involves.

 - Havoc to resend formal request for attendence at Guadec
   to the advisory board members.

GNOME-2
=======

 * Miguel reported on meeting that happened at Ximian
   between Lauris, Miguel, Michael Meeks, Jacob, Federico
   about there opinions

   Will send detailed minutes to gnome-hackers - rough
   points covered were:

   - Identify new stuff in gnome-libs that should be   
     backed out. (E.g., gnome-stock fixes)

    (Jacob was going to investigate whether it make sense
     to go back to the stable branch of gnome-libs and
     port all post-1.4 gnome-libs changes to that individually.)

   - Figure out what needs to be added to gnome libs directly
     or as dependency

   - Split gnome-libs into non-UI and UI parts?

   - What to do with Canvas? (Lauris wants different API 
     to be fundamental)

   - Possibility of having separately maintained libraries
     merged together into one so.

 * Havoc summarized the GNOME-2.0 thread:
   
   - Everybody seemed OK with a July API freeze
   
   - No real objections to December release target

   - The developer-release/user-release dichotomy which 
     was brought up in the thread didn't turn out to be a problem
     in practice.

 * Bart suggested that Havoc might want to do a summary
   of GNOME-2.0 discussions.

 * Federico suggested we need a porting document

 * Federico brought up the issue of needing to get apps
   ported early to GTK+-2.0 / GNOME-2.0 test API. Owen
   mentioned that porting to GTK+-2.0 is really easy
   unless you want to take advantage of new features.

 * Maciej thought we needed a detailed feature list /
   Roadmap for GNOME-2.0:

   Possibilities for ways of creating such a document

   a) Use bugzilla.

   b) Collection of text documents (see perl/python
      RFE procedures)

   c) Someone keeps track of mailing list traffic.
 
   Havoc suggested having bugzilla bugs pointing to
   more extensive documents.

Incorporation Update (Bart)
===================-

 * A rough schedule was sent to board-list; the job 
   could be done in a few weeks.

 * Main issue now is what type of entity the foundation
   should be:

   - California incorporated vs. Deleware incorporated

   - Mutual benefit (no non-profit status, less legal details)
     vs. Public benefit.

GUADEC
======

John had a couple of questions about GUADEC:

 * Do we have a formal statement of what sponsorship involves?
   Apparently some confusion at Sun about this. (Sentiment
   echoed from some other people.)

   Dan and Bart will check up with Martin to make sure that
   we're making this information available.

 * Do we have confirmations from advisory board members
   that they will be there? 

   Apparently we have a few confirmations, but haven't heard
   back from a lot of people. Havoc will resend out mail
   to the advisory baord members he hasn't heard back from.