Re: Moduleset Reorganization -- Take two

["Jason D. Clinton" <me jasonclinton com>]

On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 02:47, Frederic Peters <fpeters gnome org> wrote:
> Too slow probably, so after discussing things at the Boston Summit,
> new modulesets written by Jon McCann[1] were pushed, those were
> certainly close to what the release team envisoned, but they also had
> their share of problems, and the release team, and other teams, had to
> follow suit, fixing both those new sets, and the various tools that
> had been broken in the change.

Hi everyone! I bet you were hoping you'd never see another email on
this thread! ;-)

For everyone's reference, the defined modulesets are here:
http://git.gnome.org/browse/jhbuild/tree/modulesets

But that's not what this email is about. This email is as much as
follow-up to this thread as it is a follow-up to the Summit discussion
documented here <http://jasondclinton.livejournal.com/82450.html>.
Specifically, the argument over "Featured Applications." At the time,
after the session, Vincent, Ryan Lortie, and I spoke some more and I
proposed a compromise which they both liked: Release Team continue to
administer the formal new module proposal process for Core (that is,
everything which would be considered part of "GNOME OS" and is
currently in the Core moduleset) and external dependencies process as
they are handled today and Marketing Team would select applications
from the entire GNOME ecosystem to feature in marketing materials as a
means by which to promote application quality and our ecosystem. There
had been no further communication between us about this proposal until
today.

Today, representatives from the Marketing Team (Andreas, Allan and
myself) and Vincent, representing the Release Team, discussed this
because it is time to select featured applications for 3.0's
marketing. We agreed to move forward with this proposal. Beginning in
the next few days the Marketing Team will select applications to
feature for the 3.0 release. The criteria will be the following:

1. Quality
2. Solving a popular problem
3. GNOME-iness
4. Bonus points for cross-platform-iness

Our goal is simply to promote the GNOME ecosystem in any manner that
makes sense from a marketing perspective. Being a featured application
is transient, canonically maintained as a list that happens to be live
on our web sites at any given moment, and not particularly a badge of
honor to be fought over or bandied about from a module's perspective.
(It is not a statement that it is *the* GNOME app. of any particular
function.) It merely reflects the Marketing Team's feelings about the
application’s status on the above 4 criteria. And obviously, marketing
being visually dominated, visual things are likely to get more
attention.

Marketing Team will look at (and build from source with jhbuild!)
first applications which appear in the "apps" moduleset defined above
but we may look outside the jhbuild modulesets. New projects or new
application module maintainers are encouraged to continue to go
through the process of having their application included in the
jhbuild moduleset by the normal means (Bugzilla) to make it easier for
us to screenshot. We are not making any judgments about political
things like the locations of the project hosting. For example, we all
agree that Simple Scan, though hosted on LaunchPad, is going to be a
featured application. Also, we all agree that both Banshee and
Rhythmbox are excellent applications which will both be featured.
There's no reason to select just one.

In the meeting today we did not address the concern of translator
attention which was raised at the Summit but my personal feelings on
the matter are that translators will continue, as they always have, to
translate those modules which are popular regardless of whether they
are featured or not.

To make it absolutely clear, the list of featured applications is that
list which is featured on the web at any particular moment. There’s no
formal add or remove process except that normal process by which
marketing is done. People interested in having their application
featured are always welcome to mail the marketing-list to bring
something new to our attention.

Marketing Team, now more than ever, could use volunteers and is always
open to additional members. If you’re interested in joining the
Marketing Team, hop on IRC and join #marketing and join the mailing
list; we’d love the help.

One final note: at this point this is going to be JFDI by the
Marketing Team but we are always interested in hearing the GNOME
Community’s feedback. Please direct any comments or questions that you
have to marketing-list (note the CC).

Thanks for making so many awesome applications to choose from!