Planning for March/April GNOME.

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel gnu org>]

Hello guys,

   A long time has passed since the last major release of GNOME:
October GNOME.  As most GNOME developers, you know that the various
GNOME components are released under their own schedules and they are
maintained by different people.

   For outsiders, it is hard to realize what the latest "stable" GNOME
is, and sometimes they keep running old versions of the applications
which either contain bugs that we already fixed or lack features that
we already implemented.

   So in the GNOME tradition, we are preparing for the next major
release of GNOME (perhaps it could be called April GNOME, but it does
not quite sound as good as October GNOME, and sadly it lacks fuel for
fueling conspiracy theories). 

   The idea would be to release the next major GNOME release in sync
with gnome-core-1.2 together with most of the other toys we have
developed by then.  This would be a stabilization release and would
not contain either Nautilus nor Evolution as they would not be ready
in time for beta-testing.

   There are many ways in which you can contribute

* How to contribute to the Next GNOME release.

** Documentation 

   What would be great to do in the next weeks, would be to help out
   with the GNOME Documentation Project (http://www.gnome.org/gdp): to
   make sure that all applications ship with a manual, and that all
   applications that use the gnome-property-box have the help system
   linked to the "help" button.

   Dave Mason at Red Hat is coordinating this work (dcm@redhat.com).

** Icon work.

   Mathias Warkus has been doing a great work coordinating
   (mawarkus@t-online.de) the Icon development and deployment.  If you
   are good doing icons, please get in contact with him.

** Test the code

   If you are running one of the latest versions of a GNOME
   application, please provide bug reports about the application:

   1. Actual bugs in applications.

   2. Applications whose user interface is non-intuitive

   3. Crashes in applications.

   4. Uniformity problems in the user interface.

   5. Obvious performance problems in applications. 

   6. For language bindings: excercising the bindings, making sure the
      bindings all work and that things run smoothly.

** Help translating

   If you are not a programmer, but you are interested in helping
   translating the GNOME applications to your native language or
   translate the documentation, please get in contact with Kjartan who
   is coordinating the translations effort (kmaraas@online.no).

   You can learn more about which packages need help at
   http://www.gnome.org/i18n.

   We need to update that list to reflect the list of packages that we
   are going to ship with Next GNOME.

** Coordination

   Coordination will take place on the gnome-devel-list as usual.

Best wishes,
Miguel.