About GNOME 2.0 - The end of a dream

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

Originally, I didn't want to send this mail, but after reading
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2001-June/msg00104.html
you don't give me any other chance.

Fuck you and goodbye isn't what a good release coordinator or
any person with "leading qualities" would ever do, but I simply
spent two much time and efforts into GNOME 2.

Suddenly, I'm now the bad guy and I get flamed from almost everybody,
so it's time for me to face the truth and see that my work on GNOME 2
is no longer appreciated.

At the moment, I don't see any reason why I should do any further work
on libgnome or libgnomeui, this will only make more people even more
angry and doesn't buy us anything.

I believe in Bonobo and that Bonobo is the future, and now I need to
thank Michael for keeping libbonobo and libbonoboui almost totally
independent of libgnome and libgnomeui, so it should be a one day
hacking effort to remove the remaining bits of it and to make GNOME 2's
Bonobo independent of libgnome(ui).

So at least not all my work was in vain since I can now concentrate
more on Bonobo and maybe even help Michael with ORBit2.

You guys should also find another release coordinator who can then
decide to do whatever he wants with libgnome(ui).

As a last word, let me quote Jabob's GNOME 2 proposal
http://primates.ximian.com/~jacob/gnome-libs.html:

"Originally, the GNOME project's goal was to create a component architecture.
 Then people got sidetracked with the desktop environment thing. With
 GNOME 2.0, we can finally put these together and for the first time create
 a desktop environment made up of components. 

 The bonobo integration is important to do now, because we will really not be
 able to do it at this level until the next large revision of GNOME, which will
 be quite some time from now, most likely.
"

If anyone of you guys ever dreamed of a fully componized GNOME, then you can
now thank Owen and Maciej for successfully destroying this dream.

Don't bother answering as I won't read my mail for a week and learn for the
university instead.

Martin

--- Begin Message ---

• From: Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org>
• To: martin gnome org
• Subject: About GNOME 2.0
• Date: 16 Jun 2001 13:09:23 +0200

Well, maybe I'm just very frustrated at the moment, but I slowly
start to wonder what the future of GNOME 2 is or whether GNOME 2
has a future at all.

I'm really none of the persons who get pissed of and run away if
there are a few problems, but this whole stuff starts to annoy me
a lot.

Since months, I am the only person who actively works on libgnome
and libgnomeui. Several times, I ask for help [1], but the only
response I got so far is that we won't have any time to do development
on the core libraries anyways and that GNOME 2 will be just GNOME 1.4
ported to GTK+ 2.0.

So, it looks like I can assume that there will be at most 3 people
who will be working on libgnome and libgnomeui until GNOME 2 is
released. To make it worse, an even larger numer of people is now
criticizing me for what I did in libgnome(ui), but I don't see a single
line of code from them.

To make things worse, when I came home from university this tuesday I
found a mail from Owen in my inbox with made be both very angry and
very sad. This mail looked to me as if the board just decided to drop
all efforts on GNOME 2 and to go with GNOME 1.4 + ported to GTK+ 2.0.

Now, when looking at the minutes of this board meeting
(http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2001-June/msg00000.html):

    "
      - Gnome 2.0

        There is concerns that people are adding to HEAD, not stabilizing
        it, working that way there is few chances we can ship in time.

        Seems that porting the stable branch to GTK-2.0 sounds a more
        reliable way to end up with something stable. Some libgnome
        APIs needs to be removed by their new GTK counterparts, but 
        we should avoid unstable changes at the Gnome level.
    "

According to the minutes, there was nothing decided, but at least they
considered dropping libgnome and libgnomeui and starting again with the
stable branch.

And according to Owen's private mail to me, my work on GNOME 2.0 is not
wanted and the board is looking for a way to let it happen in parallel with
GNOME 2.0, but not as part of it.

Ok, now when I take a look at the calender it tells me that there are only
5 weeks left until summer term in university ends. Yet again, I missed a
lot at the university, but I also realized this week that it's not too late
to make up with everything which I missed this term if I start learning now.

Congratulations for pissing away the only person who was actually working
on libgnome(ui) and see you in five weeks, guys !

And now I care shit about that API freeze, instead I call my private live
more important and concentrate on my studies.

[1] Actually a few people and a guy from Ximian offered me help.
    However, it doesn't help me if I need to spend 3 hours exlaining
    someone what to do if I can do it myself in 2 hours. And yesterday,
    this flamewar kept me so busy that I didn't even had time to answer
    that Ximian guy nor had I time to do any hacking.

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

--- End Message ---

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