GNOME 2.0 Steering Committee minutes.

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel helixcode com>]

Hello guys,

   Here are the notes from the first meeting of the GNOME 2.0
Steering Committee that was held on March 28, 2000 at 16:00 GMT.

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Scan for [+] for topics that we did not discuss, that we might want to
discuss now regarding April GNOME.

These are the notes I took from March 28th meeting:

* Mission Statement.

   A sub-committee will prepare the by-laws and prepare the document
   for creating the GNOME Foundation.

   The proposal will be submited to this committee, we will talk about
   it, and eventually drop it on gnome-hackers for further debate and
   final approval.

   The GNOME Foundation startup team will be composed of Jonathan,
   Elliot and Bart.  

* Meta-meeting issues

   For each meeting, we will have an organizer that will setup the
   lists of topics to discuss for the next meeting and will coordinate
   the meeting.

   We will have meetings every two weeks on mondays at 16:00 GMT (That
   is 11:00 EST)

   Our next meeting is scheduled for April 10th, 2000

* Widgets, components.

   We need to address the problem of pluggable widgets and having
   applications sharing widgets without plugging them into Gtk+ or
   Gnome-Libs.

   Bonobo-based components are too heavy-weight and Bonobo is too
   inmature to be used as our component architecture.

   btw, Maciej: in Windows, the DLL that contains controls contain COM
   components.

   There are multiple solutions, but we could not reach a concensus
   over the phone line.

   Owen, Havoc, Maciej and me will be discussing that topic and
   propose a solution to the committee.

* Versioning of GNOME

   We want to move the versioning system to something that enable
   users to see a progression.  

   We want to avoid playing marketing names with the versions, and
   this is something we will run into.  Fighting the `but it is not
   correct' fight in my opinion is a lost cause.

   Maciej suggested we bump up the major number only for platform
   changes, and we bump the minor number for other changes.  Agreed,
   month names are going to run out after 12 releases, they do not
   give a clear picture of what came before what, and we have the
   Debian evidence that nobody can ever recall if Potato comes before
   Woody or the Dog.

   I said that the system had the problem that we hopefully are not
   planning on changing the platform API in the next few years, and
   that it would delay the apparition of GNOME 3.0 a lot, and that the
   user-level stuff might play a more important role in the naming
   scheme than the platform.

   We agreed that people would come up with a various naming schemes
   for GNOME that could be used to track the evolution of GNOME.

   We agreed that we should stick to the policy (for users to complain
   `hey that is not really 3.0').  But even with a policy like in
   Linux, Linus still does what he feels like doing.

* Gnome Utils needs maintainership

   Various tools there might be useful, and we have reached a point
   where Jaka has removed ghex from there to make it not be associated
   with sucky tools.

   Martin Baulig has done some work on maintaing it, and recently two
   people have submited patches to it, but we need to do more.

   Gnome-su is very important, and Ramiro Estrugo even submited some
   code yesterday that we could use.  He needs to work with Martin to
   get this thing sorted out.

* GNOME Core

   Jacob said that Gnome Core and Gnome Applets are pretty stable and
   they should be ready to go out in the very near future.  Just a few
   patches are pending.

   The documentation team has done a terrific job, and they have
   added documentation to pretty much every applet on the distribution
   now.

   We decided that by Tuesday we should have any new .desktop entries
   into Gnome Core for the translations team to translate to attack
   the problem of applications that users do not see on their desktop,
   as we do not probe for them.

   I will be posting a message to gnome-list to assemble the missing
   desktop files.

* GNOME translations

   We lack good GNOME tools for helping translators update the GNOME
   translations.  There is one in the works.  It is not finished.

   [+] 
   We need to think about giving proper time to the translators to
   update all of the packages that we will release for April GNOME, or
   it will look unpolished.

* Gnome TODO

   We need to assemble a list of tasks people can contribute to.

   We do not want it to be too detailed that people are scared to not
   contribute.

   But we want to make it visible.  Keeping an archive perhaps of
   "Projects of the Week".

   Dave will help setting up the web site.  Havoc will help
   infrastructure wise with the TODO stuff by reusing some of the Gtk
   TODO scripts.  Havoc closed with "The Labs can take care of it", or
   something similar :-).

* April GNOME package list.

   Jacob will post an initial list of packages that will be part of
   April GNOME, and we can hopefully finish it.

   [+] The Web site for internationalization needs to be updated to cover
   those packages, and perhaps we need tarball releases from the
   latest CVS branches that are part of the release for translators
   to work from.

* The new web site information.

   This is from Joakim:

> That's it, folks. In general, there's a lot to do, but I think it can be done
> in a reasonable time, say three or four weeks, if we can throw some manpower
> at it from different directions. The great thing is that it's extremely eazy
> to parallelize a lot of this, and given the existing WML structure where most
> of the design is separated from the actual content, it's going to be quite
> easy to manage in parallel too, even with a lot of people working on it.

   I will post in a separate mail his entire message. 

   I will ask him to give us a date for going live.

Enjoy,
Miguel.