Notes from the Desktop Architects Meeting

[Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org>]

Hi all,

I'm a bit late, but here are some notes I took at the DAM meeting.
They're probably far from being complete. Other GNOME people who were
there can hopefully join in and complete them or correct my errors ;-)

Comments are of course welcome.


Here's a list of concrete actions some GNOME people could do:

 - look that portland doesn't do anything we don't like, or go and do
   the GNOME part of the job
 - join the LSB mailing lists and be active there
 - help pushing the freedesktop.org spec out of the draft status
 - help with GNOME certification

Everyone should feel free to help with any of those items. If you want
to help with one item, but don't know how, just send a mail.


 + Portland project
   - general feeling of nearly everyone was that it's sad that GNOME is
     not involved in this effort
   - would be nice to get someone to at least look at the project and
     provide feedback
   - Waldo and some KDE people wanted to make a joint GNOME/KDE
     statement about the project ("we love it"). Is this something we
     want to do?

 + Standards
   - lots of LSB discussion. It seems a GNOME guy would be highly
     welcome on the LSB lists to provide feedback.
   - discussion on a common packaging/installation system. Not really
     relevant to GNOME.
   - some freedesktop.org discussion. Some specs should really leave the
     draft status.
   - some KDE people thought that GNOME was not involved enough on
     xdg-list. I'm not sure why.

 + Cooperation with Asia
   - general agreement that there was no communication between the asian
     projects (mostly the distributions) and us (= GNOME/KDE/etc.)
   - there's a United Nations guy who can be a bridge for this
   - there'll be an effort to make people meet at OLS: project manager &
     technical lead for all asian efforts, and some of us.
   - OLS meeting will be followed up by another meeting 4 or 6 months
     later
   - we should try to send people in asian regional events to show that
     we're interested in what's happening there (they don't seem to know
     that we're interested in that)
   - inviting some managers from asian projects to events such as GUADEC
     might be a good idea
   - from the desktop_architects mailing list: "speaking points were
     around education, developer integration, community exposure,
     internationalization/localization, and cultural/language hurdles"
     (this is a good summary)

 + Multimedia
   - to be honest, I'm not sure there were some real conclusions here
     except the consensus that creating a kind of "standard" would help.
     Christian probably has more details.
   - a lot of people love GStreamer ;-)

 + Nobody knows how to contact GNOME
   - people usually contact Nat or Jeff or...
   - they're not aware of a central point of communication
   - the board should probably be this point
   - we should put a list of our known representatives in other
     organizations on the website
   - it would probably make sense to have more rep people (eg, it 
     might be nice to have someone who would be a bridge between
     freedesktop.org and GNOME so we don't miss any important discussion
     there)

 + People are not aware of our sysadmin guide.
   - library.gnome.org should help with this

 + planned deprecation mechanism
   - Xorg has a mechanism for deprecation for libraries
   - we probably need to think about this in GNOME

 + aKademy will try to have a track on standards.
   - it's in Dublin, at the end of September.
   - maybe we should send some people there?

 + We definitely need to put the GNOME certification back on track
   - is this something we could manage to do before, say, September?
   - should we cooperate with the LSB people wherever it makes sense?

 + Next DAM meeting will probably be in December.


Vincent

-- 
Les gens heureux ne sont pas press�