what's happening to Nautilus, other packages (Eazel)



As Bart said in his recent email, Eazel is shutting down.

Some people are probably wondering what's up with packages maintained by former Eazel employees. Here is the status for a few of them:

Nautilus -- I'll continue to be the maintainer of Nautilus for the foreseeable future. I have time to devote to GNOME for now and I plan to continue to work to enhance Nautilus. Short term directions for Nautilus will include performance improvements and a fix to the session manager problem that plagues many 1.0.3 users. Longer term plans include porting to the GNOME 2 platform. We'll need some new blood -- new volunteers to get involved -- to help out the old hands that remain. Andy Hertzfeld is going to continue to contribute, and Ramiro Estrugo probably will too (Ramiro's out of town right now). John Sullivan may be working on Nautilus too, but he's about to take a long vacation, so he'll be out for a while. Some of the other familiar faces from Eazel might show up too, but these are the guys who specifically told me they'd continue to contribute.

gnome-vfs -- Ian McKellar <yakk yakk net> is going to take over as gnome-vfs maintainer. The good news is that gnome-vfs is already working as part of the GNOME 2 platform. Short term priorities for gnome-vfs include filling out the documentation for programmers and finishing a new API for handling authentication (done by Mike Fleming). I'd also like to see a Samba module and an ssh module to fill out the kinds of file systems that gnome-vfs works with, but we don't have any volunteers for that yet.

eel -- The library formerly known as libnautilus-extensions will be maintained by Ramiro Estrugo <ramiro fateware com> and me. The main thing planned here is conversion to GNOME 2. In the long run, we'd like to see most of this library move into real platform libraries, so this library becomes obsolete.

librsvg -- Ramiro and I will also maintain this library for now. Switching this over to GNOME 2 is the top priority. The overlap between this library and libart is something someone might want to tackle in the GNOME 2.0 time frame.

ammonite -- The main purpose of this library is to support Eazel Services. The maintainer, Mike Fleming <mikef praxis etla net>, may want to keep it going, but I think it's more likely that he'll retire it soon.

trilobite -- The main purpose of this library is to support Eazel Services. The maintainer, Eskil Heyn Olsen <eskil olsen sol dk> may want to keep it going. There's some good package management stuff in here, including the Nautilus package view, but I think it's more likely that he'
ll retire it soon.

Some other stuff:

mailing lists -- I'd like to move some mailing lists from eazel.com to gnome.org at some point. We might want to shut down some of the lists, but we definitely want to keep nautilus-list, at least. You can see the list of lists at <http://lists.eazel.com/mailman/listinfo/>.

bugzilla -- I'd like to eventually move all the bugs from bugzilla.eazel.com to bugzilla.gnome.org. If we use an algorithm that maps bug numbers in a consistent way (perhaps with some constant offset), then we can replace the Eazel bugzilla with a forwarding system so that old links to bugs could continue to work. If someone wants to work with me on this, please contact me by email. (It's OK if we lose the "time estimate", "inclination", and "target milestone" fields in this transition.)

IRC channel #nautilus -- I haven't been around the last few days, but I promise I'll be back hanging around there a bit more. Maybe we can even get Andy to start using IRC!

tinderbox -- Having a Tinderbox for Nautilus and the packages it uses has been really great during the development of Nautilus 0.1 through 1.0.3. One of the best parts for Nautilus testing was the availability of "hourly" builds in both source form and RPM packages. Ian was even working on making "hourly" builds in Debian package format too. Robin Slomkowski <robin slomkowski net> is willing to work with other GNOME hackers to get one set up. He knows a lot about making both the Tinderbox server itself and the build machines work smoothly. You might want to send him mail if you are willing to work with him.

If you have other questions, feel free to send them to one of the relevant mailing lists.

I'll be around.

    -- Darin

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