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

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Alan Cox <alan redhat com> writes:

> 
> > 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. 
> 

But I think that if we do a 1.4.1, cleaning up the bugs and making
sure to clear out anything declared critical would be an excellent
release goal. We will have the updated user environment out with 1.4.0
(not just Nautilus but many gnome-core improvements, working and
enhanced gdm, Sawfish included in the release, etc), and we'll have
the leisure to munch on the bugs and maintain the GNOME 1 platform in it's
final phase as work on GNOME 2 (hopefully) begins in earnest.

> 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.

Well, I don't think the GNOME situation is quite the same. gnome-libs
is not exactly bitrotting, it is just not advancing (there is some
sporadic work on HEAD). Realistically, though, the user environment
did need a lot more attention than the libraries. GNOME needed a good
file manager and a good email client and a component model and good
widget set fundamentals at the Gtk level a lot more than it needed
more gnome-libs noodling.

 - Maciej