Re: GNOME 1.4 extra apps coordinators

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Sun, 22 Oct 2000, Ian Peters wrote:

[SNIP]

> I think that Jamin and I can commit to helping this problem by getting
> the "extra apps" list compiled well before the release, giving the
> translation and documentation teams plenty of time to go nuts.

Is there a preliminary list somewhere publicly accessible yet?

[SNIP]

> I don't think that GNOME has ever (consistently) attempted to provide
> releases in any format other than source.  Maintainers make a source
> release; sometimes it is possible for them to provide a .spec file
> that works on one or two RPM-based distros, or a debian/ directory,
> but that's a stretch.  It's a very non-trivial problem to make
> packages that work on all of the distributions available.
> 
> As such, I don't think that we'll be making any attempt at all to make
> sure that the extra apps are initially available in any format other
> than source.  I hope that distributions and other vendors will take
> our advice and put these quality apps in their distributions, but
> that's their job, not ours.

Fair enough.

> [Puts on his Helix Code shirt] I can almost guarantee that the extra
> apps, along with the rest of the GNOME 1.4 release, will be almost
> immediately available from Helix...

This is great news.

[SNIP]

> Like I said, I think committing to providing these applications in any
> format other than source is a mistake.  However, the rest of your
> points are very good; I think we'll find that a large number of the
> extra app candidates are already in GNOME CVS, and for those that
> aren't, we should make sure that they are accessible to our
> translators and documenters, perhaps by offering to let them migrate
> to the GNOME CVS repository.

I'm glad we agree.

Encouraging the extra app maintainers to migrate the apps to GNOME CVS
should improve things significantly.  My experience in the past is that
developers are more than happy for writers and translators to work
directly in CVS.  Interestingly, in some of the first months I worked in
the GDP the most common complaint that almost every writer had was "I
wrote the manual for gfoo a month ago and emailed it to the app author 4
times and he never committed it to CVS even though he said he would."  It
was a substantial problem which we overcame by having a few GDP members
learn how to handle CVS, Makefiles, and hook up the help menu items and
buttons in applications.  Now we never have to worry about docs
languishing in people's email folders.

> However, I think Jamin and I are willing to commit to this without the
> need to assemble gnome-foo-extra packages.  I think our efforts are
> better spent on things like improving our software map with a better
> search facility, and a way of marking those applications which are
> part of the extra apps GNOME 1.4 release.

Fair enough.  It sounds like you are planning to do a lot of good things.

Dan