Re: New suites vs. common release cycle [Was: Productivity suite]

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

ons 2005-06-15 klockan 12:16 +1000 skrev Martin Sevior:
> On Tue, 2005-06-14 at 00:08 +0200, Christian Rose wrote:
> > Judging from my own experience, not many users complain that each and
> > every application out there isn't released as part of GNOME. They don't
> > know what GNOME is; they basically just got their distro and whatever
> > applications it included by default. For these users, what we officially
> > include in GNOME and what we don't wouldn't change a thing, as they get
> > all the applications anyway as part of the distro.
> > 
> > But from the users that actually know what GNOME is, I have received
> > nothing but positive feedback in terms of how the user experience of
> > consistency and integration has improved through the latest releases.
> > So, at least to me it seems strange that we should intentionally start
> > going in the opposite direction, and as a consequence be diluting our
> > brand name (for those who know the difference) for no obvious reason.
> 
> Well a lot of this is speaking in the abstract saying if we do this then
> we need to do that.
> 
> Rather than speaking in the abstract why not address what GNOME would
> get (or what GNOME would lose) by including AbiWord in it's release.
> 
> You can apply the same criteria to any other application that wishes to
> be included.
> 
> From my own biased view point here is what GNOME gets from AbiWord:
[...snip many good stuff about Abiword that I think most people are
already aware of...]

I beleive Abiword is an excellent application, and if these issues were
properly resolved, I would be all for it being officially listed as part
of the Productivity Suite (or perhaps even the Desktop release).

However, a big part of GNOME's success is having a consistent desktop.
An important part of that is allowing all contributors to easily
contribute to all parts of the desktop (given permission of course). If
people can directly fix small but annoying problems that they encounter,
problems that would otherwise had required a lot of administrativia to
get fixed, then that means a lot of fixing for free that would otherwise
simply not happen. That single aspect has meant an enormous boost to the
amount of contributions. I bet you can ask any GNOME maintainer out
there about the level of amount of good contributions that they've
received in CVS from other GNOME contributors; contributors that they
would not always have expected wanting to contribute to their
application.

And to cross-project efforts such as the GNOME Translation Project, easy
access to all modules is not just a nice thing to have, but a real hard
requirement. And up to this point and Jeff's announcement, it has been a
requirement, for all modules part of the release and needing
translations, to be hosted in the same CVS as everything else, for very
obvious reasons.


Christian