Re: Quo vadis, GNOME? (was: Getting Bugzilla support into Bug-buddy)

[Alan Cox <alan redhat com>]

>   What is missing there ? Maybe I'm just too disconnected but my understanding
> is that the frozen libraries are in a stable state and people are fixing

They arent stable, scan the number of things in the debian-bugs

>   I take care of gnome-xml, I know I have 4 registered bugs left (+1
> from Michael Meeks not listed in the DB). Some are there for nearly
> one year. I don't close them because they are valid request. I didn't
> handle them because they need a change of infrastructure or I could not
> reproduce them, or they are part of my TODO.

Right. gnome-xml is a well maintained library.

> be done at the foundation level. This can be as simple as a decision to
> block any further release if the critical ones are not fixed. Is this
> what you are asking ?

Yes, although as Maciej notes it is too late for 1.4.0. 

> policy to find the resources in the corporate world to assign bug fixing
> to a given person. It would be a shame if we had to do this, but that's
> one of the opportunity of getting large and funded and we should have
> no hesitation to make use of this lever if this is needed.

It's worth noting that what has slowly been happening to gnome happened to
the kernel for a while too. Vendors sucked a lot of maintainers out of the
main pool of developers hacking the kernel. Many of them got tangled up in
Linux project management, others disappeared into achieving great and clearly
important and critical things (in their eyes) and the core code - especially
drivers really started to go to pieces. Nowdays we have vendors and hackers
aware of that and there are people (Jeff Garzik is a great example) who is
funded by Mandrake primarily to clean up other peoples crap driver code.

One mistake we made in the kernel was also a lack of willingness to simply
clean out unmaintained code and stop shipping it. For 2.4 we marked some
drivers as obsolete and left them not compiling to see if anyone cares
but we've yet to get that right to the degree folks sensibly didnt ship
half of gnome-utils last time.

And no I see nothing different now between the debian 'if its got critical
bugs we wont ship it' event, the kernel mess mid 2.1.x and gnome. Im not
trying to be downhearted about it either. In fact its worth noting both
other victims of this disease recovered 8)

Alan


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