The critical path

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

This is an attempt to figure out what the really crucial
issues are right now for getting the core desktop apps
up and running. This list concentrates on the core desktop
apps; the things that we need to have working to say that
we have a functional GNOME-2.0 desktop.

I'm sure that I'm all wrong on what is going on in some
these areas, so please correct me, add additions and
so forth.

What I'm hoping we can do with this list is to assign dates
to the different items, and find people to take responsibility
for the dates.x

Panel
=====

 * Launchers don't currently work; they can't be created,
   and they don't save restore.

 * Applets don't save and restore; preferences for applets
   don't work.

 * Menus are not organized usefully - I have stuff like
   capplets in my applications menu. (This may be mostly
   a question of adding keywords to .desktop files)

Core Applets
============

 * We need a tasklist that works with the new window manager hints

Help Browser
============

Before we can even figure out what bugs need fixing, we need
to decide on what we are doing here:

 * Yelp or or Nautilus

 * GtkHTML2 or GtkHTML or Mozilla

Nautilus
========

Havoc posted a long detailed TODO to nautilus a while ago,
so I'll just note a few of the most obvious bugs:

 * Missing icons on the toolbar

 * Double clicking on an icon starts a drag-and-drop operation

 * Crashes on logout

I've also had bad problems with bonobo-activation-server hanging
and misbehaving, though I'm not sure if it's anything new
or just typically oaf non-robustness combined with app
instability.

Control Center
==============

 * We need to decide on _one_ shell that we are going to 
   definitely to have working for GNOME-2.0 and make that
   work: Nautilus, class tree view, or GtkHTML-based xst thingy.
   
   Other shells can be added later, but we need to have
   one working.
 
 * Get applets compiling with GTK+-2.0, GNOME-1.4

 * Write schemas for everything that the current applets configure

 * Port applets to use GConf, and port the things they configure
   to use GConf with the same keys.

Session Manager
===============

I'd expect this one to just work, since there have been no
significant changes in its deps, but unfortuantely:

 * Many apps are spewing warnings on save

 * We seem to have fairly frequent crashes

I think time tracking this stuff down would be well spent,
since an unstable sesesion manager makes everything else
difficult.

Terminal
========

 * Need to get preferences working

 * Resizing doesn't seem to work properly

Window Manager
==============

 * Get a GTK+-2.0 rep-gtk solution in CVS.

 * Get sawfish capplets working again in the GNOME-2.0 


There are other components that are important for GNOME-2.0:

 procman, gdm, gedit, gnome-games, CD player

But they aren't things people need to use the GNOME-2.0
desktop as their everyday desktop, so they are less
on the critical path for now.

Please help me flesh out the above. Thanks,

                                        Owen