Re: GNOME now

[Brian Cameron <brian cameron oracle com>]

Peteris:

On 11/15/12 06:36 AM, Peteris Krisjanis wrote:
> T , 2012.11.14. 22:37 -0600, Brian Cameron rakstīja:
> > On 11/15/12 03:31 AM, Seif Lotfy wrote:
> But is there any strong reasons why Oracle won't chime in and support
> further development of GNOME Panel (let's call it GNOME Classic - that
> all Fallback mode don't make any justice to it)? Is it financial
> problem? Strategic? I think it just lacks core maintainer, that's all.

I have been encouraging the Oracle Desktop team to step up and help,
but resources are more limited than they were in the past.  I have
found it difficult to get folks at Oracle motivated to help, though.  I
think partially because it is not clear that fixing this problem is
as easy to fix as you seem to suggest.

Note that Oracle released Solaris 11 with GNOME 2.30/2.32 not long
ago.  It is probably to be expected that Solaris is more focused on
maintaining such supported products than on new development at this
point in the release cycle.

In past years, Sun and Oracle dedicated significant resources towards
GNOME helping in areas like QA, usability, stability, a11y, multi-user
desktop features, community building (e.g. GNOME.Asia) and more.  It is
hard to know if more resources now will really be such a game changer
at a time when highly visible GNOME senior engineers keep pressing that
non-Linux GNOME is so much on their own.

That said, I am sure that Oracle will continue helping in ways.  The
Oracle Desktop team is, for example, currently working to integrate
GTK3 into Solaris 12.  While OpenGL may not work well on Sun Ray today,
some GTK3 programs likely will be needed by Solaris users.  Especially
if the GNOME community starts only providing security fixes for GTK3
versions of programs.  It is not clear to me if the GNOME community
has any plan or recommendations for dealing with GNOME 2 support, such
as a plan to provide security fixes.

Brian