Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

2010/2/25 Stormy Peters <stormy peters gmail com>:
>
>
> On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 11:53 AM, Juanjo Marin <juanjomarin96 yahoo es>
> wrote:
>>
>> This thread is about how can we set a strategic roadmap. It is more
>> about innovation vs stability. We are doing pretty well on the stability
>> side with our six-months cycle schedule. We are even adding some
>> innovation, but we must find a way to set long term ambicious goals and
>> set a plan for accomplising in all its extension. GNOME 3 looks like the
>> best strategic movement since long time ago. I'm excited about it ;). We
>> must go forward.
>>
>
> I agree! We should already have an idea about what GNOME 4 will look like so
> we can create a plan to get there and excite others to join us. What's our
> vision?
>

I'm actually with you on that literally Stormy ;-)

And I really appreciated the nature of the idea that Dave proposed
in his last mail, we need to get some excitement in the air and
IMO that means we need to act as a better umbrella to innovative
hackers who want write some really excellent code.

I've been trying to figure how to speak my mind here without
causing flames and stuff, I guess the subject is touchy, but when
I say literally above, I mean I think we should have been working
on GNOME 3 for a long long time by now.. and not in a hurry
to release it.

Theres been alot of words tossed around about GTK+/GSEAL and
needed refactoring etc, my opinion is that we've somehow turned
out to be very corporate and results oriented with our 6 months
release cycle and constant need to maintain api compatability.

We also have to consider that any refactoring work that could have
been done in a long term unstable development branch was simply
not done because there was no such long term development plan,
and we have to be fair: saying that we can break API a few years
later is not going to call back all the hackers that had something
interesting to implement or some refactoring work they had ready
at times over the past years.

So maybe theres a compromise we can make at an infrastructural
level, maybe we can start targeting GNOME 4 right now and still
maintain our 6 month release cycle for incremental releases (open
branches, announce a 3 year or so release target for a new GNOME
with no strings attached).

This way we can try to be fair to everybody:
  - we can provide infrastructure and support for development of
incremental and stable software releases of GNOME
  - we can also be fair to our contributors and allow them to plan for
something truely fantastic, without too much
    unneeded public exposure.

Well these are just some ideas that have been in my head these days,
it seems we need to make GNOME a cool place to innovate new stuff;
maybe we should talk about how to achieve that, I think a good place
to start is by reexamining our release cycles and inventing something
a little new.

Cheers,
            -Tristan