Is GNOME 2 dead ?

[Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org>]

It was not my intention to work or read or write mail on my 25th birthday.
But then I overslept, missed a train needed to find out when I need to be
there and realized that I won't make it in time.

So now I'm wondering, is this the day when GNOME 2 died ?

At least, it seems so for me. We suddenly reached a point where any clown
can do whatever he wants without asking and all of a sudden, we aren't in
an API freeze anymore.

I start to think that it was a big mistake to make Anders Carlsson the new
libgnome* maintainer - we had a really good libgnome and libgnomeui before
he took over maintainership from me and we even freezed its API in time.
In the last three months, it was absolutely obvious for me that we'll freeze
GNOME 2 end of July and that this freeze is very important and stuff.

But now, Anders seems to be god and the rules doesn't apply for him anymore.
Suddenly, he and George can make any changes they like to the platform just
because they think that's the right way to go - no matter how big the impact
of this change is - and they don't even need to ask anyone - they can just
commit without any authorization.

I was the libgnome* maintainer for several months and I think I can call myself
being one of the most active GNOME 2 contributors - and then, after hacking on
GNOME 2 for weeks without any holidays or weekends - some Saturday evening, I
went to a discotheque - and when I returned home I realized that suddenly there
are major changes in libgnome(ui), changes which will even affect the whole
platform and have very bad side-effects such as leaving us with three
non-deprecated config systems and others.

Nobody asked or even told me about this changes - I read my mail all the time,
but I didn't even realize it until Monday when I wanted to commit a patch from
Lazlo Peter to libgnome and was very surprised when I updated it from CVS.

But it looks like Anders Carlsson is god and thus rules don't apply to him - and
I'm the bad guy because I reverted his unauthorized changes.

-- 
Martin Baulig
martin gnome org (private)
baulig suse de (work)