Re: Nautilus directions and plans...

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Tue, 2005-06-14 at 10:06 +0200, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen wrote:
> Is there anything as a roadmap/.plan for Nautilus? It seems to me that
> there are lots of small undirected development efforts that never really
> catch on, going on in the would-be contributor world. With more guidance
> these efforts might start converging into something bigger.

At the moment there really isn't any roadmap for Nautilus, plus two of
the maintainers (me and campd) are very busy with other projects, and
don't have much time to do anything.

> "Look in Bugzilla" would be the fast answer to this, but people (like
> me) who are not 100% adapt walking the GNOME jungle, easily spend
> countless hours browsing the lists, never knowing what is a small fix,
> and what requires major intervention (what is important, and do the
> maintainers even want this fixed?). Thus losing motivation pretty
> quickly.

Looking in bugzilla is actually a pretty bad advice for Nautilus. The
nautilus bugzilla component is filled with stuff, to the extent that its
almost unusable. (Although Martin and others have been doing an
herculean job making it better!) Bugzilla is just filled with lots of
old bugs that may not matter anymore and lots and lots of RFCs and ideas
that may or may not be very interesting.

> If 5-10 ten bugs where singled out by the maintainer team and a handful
> of features/changes/enhancements/ideas also concocted by the maintainers
> (perhaps with input from other GNOME projects) together with a long-term
> goal, where maintained somewhere, it might catalyst the hacking desires
> of would-be contributors.
> 
> To make sure people where not looking at deprecated version of this file
> it might only live in CVS or on the Nautilus homepage.
> 
> Actually the above applies to any of the bigger GNOME components.

The maintainers are generally extremely overloaded and busy in free
software projects. Thus things like this aren't very common. Instead
what generally happens is that what gets done is the things done by very
driven individuals who just sits down and does things.

Its sort of sad, because your proposed model is clearly much nicer. I
wish I had the time and energy to implement it. Of course, there are a
million other things that would be very nice if I had the time to do
too.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a scrappy white trash dog-catcher on the run. She's a bloodthirsty 
wisecracking opera singer descended from a line of powerful witches. They 
fight crime!