Deskbar Applet / Feature Freeze

[Raphael Slinckx <raphael slinckx net>]

Hi !

I'm one of the deskbar-applet maintainer. The module isn't strictly part
of gnome yet, but since we have proposed it, and it seems to be accepted
by the majority we are taking the 2.14 release cycle seriously.

There has been for quite a long time a background work to make a better
UI for the applet, the work is nearly done but the two people working on
it (me and Mikkel) are now in exams until the 22 January, and so we are
not able to finish it before the 18th feature freeze.

Here is a screenshot of the future UI (not polished yet)
http://raphael.slinckx.net/deskbar-p.png

The old UI can be seen on these screenshots:
http://raphael.slinckx.net/deskbar/screenshots.php

We are fairly convinced that it will be ready before the UI freeze of 30
January, but it may also be seen as a new "feature" even though the code
being patched is just the UI.

This new UI would be really important for gnome 2.14 since it's much
clearer and will allow us to circumvent some limitations of the
entry-in-panel and GtkEntryCompletion about which our users are
complaining in bugzilla (for example vertical panel support).

We also want to support both the new and old ui since we agree that
people might prefer the old one.

So the question is the following: is such a change considered an UI or
feature change, and if it's the latter, can we still commit the change
after the feature break when time permits (before the UI freeze of 30
January) ?

Thanks for your attention :)
Raf