Current status of gnome-utils

[Pierre Benz <benz pierre gmail com>]

Let me introduce myself to the list before I continue. My name is Pierre
Benz and I am currently a 4th year Computer Science student at the
University of Cape Town. I've been using GNOME for a couple of years now
and have finally, due to my own perspective of my coding ability have
increased, decided to contribute to the project. After looking around to
all the different projects to start contributing to, I decided that
gnome-utils and gnome-usability were probably the two projects that I
would like to join.

So, this brings me to the next question.
What is the current status of gnome-utils? 
After reading
http://log.emmanuelebassi.net/archives/category/gnome-utils/ and trying
to keep track of any news regarding gnome-utils, the main issues that I
can see is gnome-system-log and gnome-screenshot needing some love,
gfloppy needing a complete rewrite and the need for man-power.

With regards do gfloppy, which I started on a project but soon realised
that a) it's way out of my league and b) reading http://blog.fubar.dk/,
I realised that any future developments on removable disks or disk type
of programs will have to move to devicekit. Having looked at David
Zeuthen's Palimpsest briefly (alas, debian devicekit packages are hard
to find), I would say that this would probably be the best bet to wait
for. I'm sure he will put it up for HIG reviews and it might be a lot
better to have Palimpsest as a gnome-utils package (or external
gnome-disk-utility) and have an external nautilus plugin such as "Format
disk" for quick formatting. 

Not only that, but what other utilities do you feel gnome-utils should
include? These include utilities that you might miss from other utility
packages, utilities that might improve usability throughout GNOME or
they might include utilities that you feel are not present anywhere.
Let's not ignore simple utilities that might be easily done with a
console but might be a lot harder to do for people who have never used a
console before.. Stuff like a cron manager etc.

Or, should we only have a handful of utilities in the gnome-utils
package? 

Either way, I think it's always crucial to look at the vision and
function of a specific package as the years go by. What is needed? What
isn't needed anymore? What has become obsolete? Maybe we should set up
the wiki to start looking at these things and have a poll as to which
features people think are needed. 

As for me, I would love to start contributing ASAP. Please do note that
I still do have University assignments etc, as I'm sure other people
have jobs which means they can't be working on GNOME stuff 24/7. Plus,
while I might feel slightly more confident in handling certain coding
issues, I am by no means a master.  

BTW, is there an IRC channel for us to meet wrt gnome-utils?

thanks for the time
Pierre