Re: question for candidates

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Wed, 2011-05-25 at 11:10 -0700, Andy Tai wrote:
> As Fedora is the only current GNU/Linux distribution adapting GNOME
> 3.0 as the default desktop, how would you facilitate to make GNOME
> technologies to work well (meaning minimal local patching needed) on
> other GNU/Linux distributions like Debian, and such distributions
> which may work on components competing with certain parts of GNOME,
> such as Ubuntu?  And how would you facilitate to make GNOME 3 run well
> on other free OS environments, especially the BSD based ones, like
> OpenBSD and FreeBSD?

Part of the reason GNOME 3 isn't on many distros yet is just
that it's new. Many of them will pick it up in time. That's
fine. If there are technical issues, then I encourage the
developers of those platforms to talk to our community. Or
better yet, be a part of our community.

I don't think this should have to involve the board. Maybe
we can do something to reduce friction, but I don't know
what exactly. Developers will work on what they want to
work on.

> And how would you facilitate collaborations with Ubuntu, especially,
> despite the different viewpoints of developers on issues like GNOME
> Shell vs. Unity?

I think it's important to make a distinction between the
GNOME desktop environment and the GNOME developer platform.

Ubuntu decided to create their own desktop environment.
They built it off of the GNOME platform, and that's great.
We should encourage other users of our developer platform
to work with us on the bits we share. XFCE uses a lot of
our platform as well. We should talk to them too.

If Ubuntu wants to a support a GNOME remix (as they do for
KDE, XFCE, etc), then we should support that. But we need
to focus on the distribution channels that are going to
get the GNOME desktop to users.

--
Shaun