Re: Kicking off planning session planning

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Dave:

One topic that might also make a good track would be stability.  This
year Sun is sending two Architecture Review Council chairs to GUADEC
to speak on this topic.  I think this is a significant and timely
gesture from Sun.  One reason that GNOME has difficulty competing with
operating systems from Microsoft and Apple is that their platforms
tend to be more stable.  Programs built for the earliest releases
of Windows still work on their latest OS offering, for example.  It
isn't surprising that many users expect this sort of stability from
their OS and become disappointed when they run into issues like
their GNOME 2.0 programs breaking in a GNOME 2.10 environment.
This GUADEC would be a good time to discuss how to tackle the problems
that cause GNOME to lag behind in this arena.

There are plenty of examples of how GNOME could do better at making
a stable desktop.  One quick example would be that the current GNOME
ABI definition is very vague:

  http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/api_rules.html

I am currently working to help propose a better definition...

  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=170860

Lots of other examples, but that should give you a flavor.

Perhaps this could fit into one of the tracks you suggest (Developer,
or Interoperability), but this is a pretty big topic itself.

Brian

> So far, the activity on the wiki around the planning sessions has been 
> modest (to say the least).
>
> To kick things off, I'd like to propose some stuff.
>
> First, there's a page in the wiki 
> http://live.gnome.org/Stuttgart2005/FreeformSessions which people can 
> use to announce sessions, define agendas and invite participants.
>
> I would like to propose 4 "tracks" for the planning sessions - we have 4 
> big rooms, and they can serve as points-of-contact for people with a 
> zone of interest, and there should be lots of small rooms or spaces 
> available for people to scoot off into their own little groups 
> afterwards. The rooms should be meeting points for people to find the 
> project/session they're interested in.
>
> The 4 tracks I propose are:
>
> * Interoperability - everything to do with making GNOME work better with 
> KDE, OO.o, XFCE, Mozilla - not just a freedesktop session, but primarily.
> * Developers platform - gtk+, glib, atk, gconf, gnome-print, libgnome: 
> All the infrastructure we share across the desktop. Probably a good 
> place to talk about ABI stability too.
> * Desktop - the user-visible desktop, planning sessions and 
> brainstorming for application teams goes here.
> * Infrastructure - Bugzilla, docs, web team, source control, marketing 
> (which is in the schedule already)
>
> The whole afternoon is really one big planning session - Topaz for 
> discussion of major desktop-wide changes, the foundation AGM for 
> organisational brainstorming, and 2 hours 'freeform'.
>
> So far, we haven't really defined what "freeform" means. Consider this a 
> definition.
>
> Cheers,
> Dave.