Re: question for candidates

[Jeff Fortin <nekohayo gmail com>]

Le mardi 20 mai 2014 à 11:56 -0700, Andy Tai a écrit :


> What are your views on the participation of the people of these
> projects, as stake holders in the direction of gtk+, in the GNOME
> Foundation?  Should the GNOME Foundation encourage (reach out to)
> these people to get them involved in the GNOME Foundation so they also
> have a say and even contribute to gtk+ so gtk+ can continue to serve
> their needs well, important for the continuing successes of gtk+ in
> the free software world?

I am unaware of the GTK+ project actively discouraging* participation,
and I'm not sure that downstreams are "choosing not to fix GTK+ because
they specifically don't want to" - rather, they're undermanned just the
same, and busy enough with their own amount of bugs (just look at how
long release cycles are for apps like GIMP, Inkscape, PTV...).

It is not a problem easily fixed by marketing/outreach (and I say this
from experience as the PTV marketing machine!). I think anyone will
agree that GTK+ needs help, but whether or not that happens is a
technical matter, heavily dependent on available skilled manpower.

GTK+ is, as far as I know, an open meritocracy like any other
respectable Free Software project and I'm pretty sure the maintainers
are overjoyed when potential new contributors show up, which I suspect
is a very rare occurrence.

The way I see it (with my downstream/community hat on), GTK+ is a
big/complex codebase, with an overloaded infrastructure (in this case,
the bug tracker) leading to an unclear course of action, lagging
community interaction, somewhat foggy roadmap and maintainers being in
"survival mode", which is perfectly understandable given the
circumstances. The "infrastructure" (or "process") side of things is
something I'd like to help address (I touched upon the subject in one of
my GUADEC 2013 talks), but it's really not going to happen overnight,
especially as we are all volunteers.

Related reading: the comments section of
https://oli4444.wordpress.com/2014/03/22/engaging-developers/


*: I posit that it is simply a side-effect of all I've mentioned above,
   which makes it kind of a chicken-and-egg situation.