Re: What are the community's goals for 2.0? [was Re: Getting serious about releasing]

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Wed, 2002-04-24 at 12:10, Alex Larsson wrote:
> We have to options right now:
> 
> (1) a 2.0.0 that has no major, individually embarrasing bugs, is basically 
> stable but has a large collection of small bugs (many of which were even 
> in Gnome 1.4). A user can use this desktop and mostly get his work done.

It is my (again personal) belief that the currently suggested collection
of small bugs will (1) collectively be kernel-2.4.0 level embarassing
and (2) be a total turnoff to new users. It'll be fine for old-school
gnome folks, and if that is what the community thinks the target
audience is, yay, great, like I said- I'll work my ass off for it.

> (2) We postpone 2.0.0 indefinately, waiting for "all the bugs to get 
> fixed".

I never said indefinitely but whatever :) 

> But nobody is interested in working on the boring blocker bugs 
> (after all, gweather was broken since 1.0, why should I care about it 
> now).

As said in other emails, this is a definite and real fear. My personal
sense is that people are not yet at that stage but I admit that I don't
know that for a fact, which is why I'm looking for feedback.

> We slowly slip our release dates, eventually past the next Mandrake 
> (insert random distro here) internal feature freeze date. They take a look 
> at gnome 1.4 (latest stable), compare it to KDE 3.1 (KDE is good at doing 
> regular stable releases), laugh and decide to drop gnome support. After 
> the firste distro drops gnome everyone else soon follows suit. No users 
> see the new gnome code, so everyone assumes it's a stagnant project. Gnome 
> becomes a footnote in the annals of history. RIP.

My concern is that if we rush they'll do the exact same thing when
comparing gnome 2.0 and kde 3.1.

> Anyway. Personally I don't think May 22 is quite possible. And I'm willing 
> to delay it a bit to stableize the release. But I strongly belive that we 
> must be punting feature requests

We've been punting feature requests for ages; I'm sorry that my reports
suck too much so they included those. I fear that led to confusion, and
it was unintended. As Havoc will tell you I've been first in line to
scream at new features for some time. Please, please ignore anything
that is marked enhancement :) 

> drop broken features that nobody is actively fixing

The vendors /will/ be fixing at least some of those; like I said to Owen
if we drop all of those right now we'll have a basically non-functional
desktop.

> and punt non-crasher bugs in non-critical components.

Again, lots of little bugs add up to a seriously embarassing release for
people who are new to gnome. Yes, we need to be punting stuff. But I've
been (effectively) punting stuff for months- take a look at all the
GNOME2 bugs that /aren't/ 'high' priority. The sum total of that list
will scare you.

Luis