Re: Reboot: Strategic goals for GNOME

[Paul Cutler <pcutler gnome org>]

Hi,

On Wed, 2010-03-03 at 04:35 -0600, Andrew Savory wrote:
> Hi,
> 
<snip>
> 
> Focussing in on one area that I can talk about: Qt is perceived by some to be stronger from a business perspective due to the 'more complete' offering: extensive documentation and an SDK.

Shaun McCance and I were talking about this a couple of weeks ago. I'm
not trying to steal his thunder (and I hope he replies on list) but he
has spent a significant amount of time in the last couple of weeks and
has put together some thoughts around planning new Developer Docs on
lgo[1].

> 
> Perhaps more focus on and promotion of GNOME's developer tools/sdk offerings would be a useful meta-goal for the coming year? Somehow enunciating the proposition that you don't need to be an alpha-dog developer to get engaged with GTK etc.
> 
> For example, I only recently found out about Anjuta: it's presumably a fairly important tool for people developing using GNOME technologies, but look at the results at http://www.google.com/search?q=anjuta&as_sitesearch=www.gnome.org (Yes, I know there's a ton of stuff at library.gnome.org, I'm being devil's advocate here ...)
> 
> 
> Andrew.
> 

I agree some promotion on GNOME developer tools is a good idea.   There
is no question from a marketing / segmentation standpoint we serve
multiple groups, including users (focus this year on GNOME 3.0),
developers and others such as OEM partners, ISVs, etc.

But we have a chicken and the egg problem - we need to have the tools
and documentation ready, whether that's developer docs, code snippets,
before we do some promotion, in my opinion.

I've also been watching Jono Bacon drive a similar initiative within the
Ubuntu community around Opportunistic Development which has some
interesting parallels to this discussion.  (They're doing a whole week
of activities right now on this). [2]

[1] http://live.gnome.org/DocumentationProject/Planning/DeveloperDocs
[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpportunisticDeveloperWeek

Paul