Re: Release dates

[Ettore Perazzoli <ettore ximian com>]

On Wed, 2002-04-24 at 19:04, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 1. Perhaps we've been bad about regular releases because we always
>    creep instead of punting things. We need to learn to punt.  GTK 2
>    only came out when we finally said "god dammit, we are just going
>    to punt a whole lot of stuff." And it wsan't the end of the world.
>    GTK 2 does its job and works pretty well.

IMHO GTK suffered from more than feature creep.  The developers just
stopped caring about 1.2 and went on rewriting everything...  So of
course it took forever, it didn't get tested by the GNOME community, and
went out late.

What we need is more synergy between GTK and GNOME.  GNOME horribly
suffered from the fact that, for a long time, GTK 1.2 was completely
unmaintained, and GTK 2.0 was completely unusable and required a huge
amount of work to port things to.  So of course the porting work started
late, and there was not enough time to do proper planning of the new
features and concentrate on making the desktop kick ass from a user's
perspective.

For a long time, we just waited for GTK to be "done".  So I think it's
kind of funny that, after spending all this time to let the GTK
maintainers make GTK "Perfect", we are now arguing that the desktop can
go out unpolished and incomplete.

Although, I am not completely disagreeing with you on the fact that we
should just be releasing the damn thing.  ;-)  I am just pointing this
out in the hope that we won't be making the same mistake again.

> 3. We made a conscious decision to fool around with libraries and
>    whatnot instead of working on the user desktop. With 20/20
>    hindsight I think this was the largest mistake we could possibly
>    have made.

Very true.

-- 
Ettore