Write up of GNOME BOF

[Glynn Foster <glynn foster sun com>]

Hey there,
I've put together a few notes on the 'GNOME Desktop - Where the heck do
we go from here' BOF, but I'm sure I have missed tons of stuff [1].

I did a couple of slides a while back for novelty factor, but didn't
actually use them [hence the non-polished factor] -

	http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~gfoster/guadec_slide/img0.html

Anyway, I guess it would be good to get some sort of discussion
happening on the mailing lists...and maybe hash out some timelines [3]

				See ya,
					Glynn ;)

[1] Sharon [2] wasn't doing her job properly
[2] aka Jeff - don't ask, it's easier that way
[3] although possibly this is a release team thing ... I dunno

The GNOME Desktop - Where the heck do we go from here?

'Oooh, a flame BOF' - Havoc Pennington


Installation of GNOME -
=======================

We all pretty much agreed that making installation easy
for GNOME is very important. With the success of many of
the build scripts [vicious-build-scripts, jhbuild, 
eazel-hacking and GARNOME], GNOME 2.0 has been very 
accessible to a large user base, and consequently things 
get tested, bugs logged and later fixed. It's pretty crucial
that we have scripts like this because distributions might 
not always be up to date when the product is going through 
beta/alpha/rc stages.

 - Should this be entirely left up to the distributions?
 - Should we even try to make installing the GNOME desktop 
   easier?
 - Is it worth putting time and effort into putting a 
   frontend onto something like GARNOME? Jeff has a TODO list
   for things he'd like to add to these scripts.


Introduction to GNOME -
=======================

We showed the Windows XP introduction/tutorial. This 
introduction seemed to act as two things -

General Marketing Spew -

   It would be really great if GNOME could get to a stage 
   where it would market itself. This seems to be a great
   place to contain the following -

	 - What's new to the desktop
	 - Who's involved in this project
	 - How could you contribute to the project
	 - How to get involved in 'Friends of GNOME'
	 - Specific corporate/distribution information

Information to New Users -

   Despite the flashy graphics and the cheesey American voice,
   this really seemed to contain some really useful information
   that could conceivably help new users. It would contain some
   brief information about the following -

	 - How to navigate around the desktop
	 - How to change their background/panel/etc settings
	 - The list is endless
   
 - Why the heck don't we have something like this? 
 - Flash is proprietory so that we would have to do something like
   static html pages...or maybe some gdk-pixbuf magic.
 - Seth has been doing some work on this already


Unmaintainable Modules -
========================

This is the real problem in that they are both buggy and no one
wants to hack on them eg. gnome-session, libgtop, sawfish etc..

 - Removing the category from bugzilla.gnome.org isn't going to 
   help since users will just try and log the bug against 
   something else
 - We should have a file in CVS that indicates the activity [and/or 
   something in bugzilla.gnome.org]
 - We need some definite plans for time scales and a certain amount
   of discussion on the mailing lists


Enterprise GConf -
==================

We need to have a good enterprise GConf solution. System Administrators
need to be able to deploy the desktop across the network easily, with 
complete control of what he/she wants the users to access.
eg. having some sort of relation to UNIX groups so that the system 
administrator could have an 'accessibility' group with associating
configuration.

 - GConf really blows for this sort of thing
 - Havoc has a plan [tm] but if he told us, he'd have to shoot us
 - This is probably going to happen for GNOME 2.2 [or whatever we
   release next]


System Tools -
==============

This is a difficult issue. Seth felt that GNOME needs to think of itself
as closer to the system level and as such system tools [ie. Ximian Setup
Tools] should be as much a part of the desktop than a mailer or web
browser. Although the idea is a good in concept, many of the distributions
[RedHat, Sun] ship their own system tools so a common cross platform/dist 
system tool seems to be difficult to achieve.


Style Guides -
==============

We have 3 style guides which unfortunately not everyone knows about.
We have the Accessibility, Usability and Documentation Guides. They
are in various stages of drafting but it is hoped that they will be 
ready for GNOME 2.2.

 - We need to get these finished so that conformance is a definite
   release requirement
 - There needs to be better integration of the guides, especially
   with respect to the documentation glossary [should this be 
   seperated?]

General Discussion -
====================

 - Need to make sure that GNOME supports IPV6 [this seems to be a gnome-vfs
   and/or ORBit2 issue]
 - Need to make sure that multi-head is supported [gnome-panel, sawfish]
 - It would be nice to get a HOWTO on debugging put up on the new webpages