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

[msevior physics unimelb edu au]

[background to AbiWord-devs]

GNOME would like us to host our CVS ON THE GNOME-cvs (or superceeded
system)server




> 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.
>

Ah interesting. I didn't realize people did direct contributions into
other projects without asking permission.

I think I would definately have a problem with this :-( We've seen a
number of well-meaning patches with with nasty side-effects in AbiWord.

Regarding translations, this is definately a culture-change but it it
clearly time to air this on the AbiWord mailing list.

I'll CC this reply to the abiworl-ml to get their input.

Cheers

PS. I'm on holiday at Surfers Paradise, typing from an internet cafe so my
reponses might be a bit infrequent.
>
> Christian
>
>