Re: Call for hackfest ideas

[Dave Neary <bolsh gnome org>]

Hi,

I'm unclear how useful it will be to throw out ideas without matching it
up to names of developers interested & motivated to go & fix the
problems, but anyhoo...

Luis Villa wrote:
> If that is part of what made the gtk hackfest successful, should we be
> thinking about higher-level stuff (widgets/gadgets, panel replacement,
> collaboration software, etc.) where the critical parties need to get
> together and make decisions and then write code, as well as/instead of
> lower-level stuff where the decisions are known and we 'merely' need
> to get coding done? (Coding is obviously important, so I'm not
> knocking those, I just am wondering if we should be sure to explicitly
> include some of the bigger-picture items as well.)

This is my opinion too - I think it'll be easier to get people worked up
about a user-visible feature, or get a large team to work together, than
to throw out favourite bugs or buggy libraries.

Here's my #1 and #2 big target usecases of the moment:

 * Smart-phone synchronisation: This is hard because it crosses so many
applications. Plug in a smartphone into your PC, try to sync mail,
address & calendar. It's hard. Sometimes it's impossible. I have yet to
figure out how to sync contacts and calendar if I'm using Thunderbird
and Lightning. It's also hard if you're using Evolution. It would be
nice if it could be worse whichever I'm using.

 * Sound: I have no idea if people feel this is necessary, but I'd
really like to see people get the sound recording & VoIP usecases
working properly (it may be as simple as educating application
developers as to the proper way to use ALSA/PulseAudio) - we seem to
have sorted out playback at this stage, but there are still a bunch of
issues to sort out from the iron up to get sound input/output + webcams
working properly.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
bolsh gnome org