Generating excitement in GNOME

["John (J5) Palmieri" <johnp redhat com>]

I am sure you guys are well aware that many people found our last few
releases boring.  I have argued that boring is actually good as people
are working on the less sexy bits so that GNOME becomes more stable and
that the more sexy bits are being work on but have yet to be proposed or
are just not ready for inclusion into GNOME.

That being said I don't think the problem is sexy things aren't
happening in GNOME but that we just don't advertise them.  Things like
telepathy, gimme and bigboard.  Many people also fail to start projects
because they think the rejection from not being in GNOME means they will
never be part of GNOME.  It also sucks because we land API's in a
release but no one uses them because they weren't in previous releases
so no one experimented with them.

I was talking about this to Keith Packard and jg waiting for a flight
from Sao Paulo airport and came to the conclusion that we should have
some sort of RFC module or futures track which proposed applications and
API's would be able to be part of the release with the caveat that they
may not be fully adopted or if they are may look completely different
once they are accepted into one of the other modules.  

For instance putting the NetworkManager API's in here would allow us to
formally put constraints on acceptance into the platform, give the NM
developers a sign that if they do the right things it will get in and
give developers a sign that they can optionally depend on it with the
knowledge that API's may change. We did something similar with D-Bus'
DBUS_API_SUBJECT_TO_CHANGE macro.  While some people complained about
changing API's we could just shoo them off by telling them they agreed
to it.  The benefits of such were that people experimented and everyone
knew D-Bus would eventually become a household API.  It allowed D-Bus to
mature much faster.

What do people think?

-- 
John (J5) Palmieri <johnp redhat com>