Re: [gdm-list] GNOME Roadmap - Information Request for gdm2

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Lucas:

There are other very active developers on GDM, such as William Jon
McCann and Lucasz Zalewski (and others) so they may have further
comments.  If so, you will get other responses for GDM.

> GNOME 2.18 was released ~1 month ago, and we've all started to focus
> on the next development cycle. A new roadmapping process has been
> proposed[1] to know our short-term and long-term plans. The goal is to
> compose a GNOME-wide roadmap for the next stable releases. And we need
> your help to do this. It's important that you take a few minutes to
> reply to the following questions before May 7.
>
> ----
>
> - What are your plans for GNOME 2.20 (next 4 months, before feature and
>  UI freezes)?

Probably the most significant new change is that William Jon McCann is
doing a lot of cleanup work with the goal of making the GDM daemon use
GObjects.  Once this is done, it will be possible to make more use of
D-Bus to support features like showing the Shutdown/Reboot/Suspend
options in various programs.  Perhaps William could respond with
more specifics on his plans.

Now when users modify the language in GDM, they can cause the
GDM greeter to restart in the selected language.

GDM supports RBAC (Role Based Access Control) for Shutdown, Reboot,
and Suspend.

There is also work underway to redesign gdmsetup so that the GUI no
longer needs to run as root, and supports a more simple mechanism
for notifying the greeter that it needs to update when configuration
options are changed.

Going forward for 2.20, I think we will continue to work on fixing
bugs, improving usability, and making GDM more flashy.

> - What are your plans for GNOME 2.22 (next year)?

I suspect some of the items mentioned above in the 2.20 roadmap
will likely take a few releases to finish.

For example, there has been discussion about making the transition
between GDM and the session more sophisticated, and I suspect this might
take some time to implement since it will involve coordinating
with how GNOME and KDE (and other) sessions work.

> - Do you have plans for a future release?

Yes, there are no shortages of enhancement requests for GDM, and
we are slowly working our way through them.

> - Do you have any goals from 2.18 that were not achieved? Why?

Some enhancements that were planned for 2.18 didn't make it into
that release, but are now in 2.19.  The "switch language" feature,
for example.

> - Is there something that is really missing in our infrastructure or
>  platform that would help you?

GDM supports its configuration options in a Stable way, but since GDM
is a "desktop" module, this is currently managed in a module-specific
way.  It would be nicer (and more clear to users) if the GNOME community
had a standard way that desktop modules could define certain interfaces
as Stable.  Other interfaces (such as many that are exposed in the GNOME
Sysadmin Guide) probably also fall into this category.

> - Do you have plans to work on other modules not maintained by you?
>  What are they?

I often work on multimedia related modules, and fixing Solaris specific
issues in various GNOME modules.

> - Do you have any GNOME-wide goals suggestions for the next releases?

I would like to see an update on how Platform modules are evolving (e.g.
in relation to Project Ridley and Project Portland), and more work
focused on defining exactly what interface stability means in the GNOME
desktop.

> ----
>
> You can reply those questions in two ways: you can directly create a
> wiki page for your module's roadmap or you can just reply this
> message to roadmap-list gnome org 
>
> To create the wiki page, follow the instructions:
>
> 1. Create a wiki page under http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap/ModuleName,
> where "ModuleName" is a wiki word version of your module (i.e Gedit,
> LibGnome, GnomeVfs, etc). You can use this template for the wiki page
> initial content:
>  http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap/ModuleTemplate
>
> 2. Add a link to the new page in http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap/Modules
> and set the status column to "Info" accordingly.

I will likely go ahead and do the above after some time.  I'd like to
see if other GDM developers have further comments, though, first.

> ----
>
> You can keep track of the roadmapping process for your (and other)
> modules at:
>  http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap/Modules
>
> For more information about the roadmap process, go to:
>  http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap/Process
>
> For more information about our schedule, go to:
>  http://live.gnome.org/Schedule
>
> Thanks for your contribution!
>
> The Roadmap Gang
>
> [1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/devel-announce-list/2007-March/msg00011.html
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