Re: [draft] Planning for GNOME 3.0

[Luis Villa <luis tieguy org>]

Overall:
This is a much, much stronger document than I expected, and can form
the basis for legitimate forward progress. A very good start.

Big comments:

I like the focus on shell and journal; I tend to think that this is
not *enough* to keep us relevant, but they are a good conceptual start
and should kick us out of our rut.

The answer to 'what if people still want panel' is 'there *will* be an
'enterprise gnome' (aka 2.x) indefinitely' because the almost-certain
reality is that the enterprise providers will be be forced to continue
to provide panel, etc. May be better to acknowledge this up front.

It is slightly disappointing to see no talk of 'bringing platform into
21st century'; i.e., easy web access by devs, deep IM/people
integration, or jscript. (yay for jscript mostly killing the java/c#
discussion! ;)

Almost certainly necessary to say something better than "the mobile
team could do something if they want"; maybe the board's mobile group
could be contacted about this? I presume gtk 3.0 would have lots of
appealing features for them.

Our six-month cycle works because we are making small, incremental
changes; while I admire the boldness of thinking such massive changes
are possible in a six month cycle, I also think you're crazy. Accept
right now that (unless there is massive investment in testing, and
probably even not then) this will absolutely not happen on calendar.
(hint: with sun and RH spending literally millions of dollars, 2.0.0
was still way off schedule and not of shippable quality. And that was
with changes that were relatively speaking very small- we were
refining the user experience, not completely changing it like we would
be doing with shell and journal, which will require user testing if
done right.)

smaller comments:

"What we are missing is people blessing one specific vision and making
it official, giving goals to the community so we can all work together
in the same direction... we believe this is what the release team did
in the 2.0 days"- I'd say that this was not the case. The vision and
leadership came very clearly from the community (primarily havoc and
the Sun and RH usability folks, and to a lesser extent the ximian
team). The release-team rubber-stamped those decisions, and did the
day-to-day of making sure it actually happened *once broader forces
(including heavy financial involvement from Sun)* had started it on
the road to happening. So to say the release team 'stopped doing this'
is incorrect; the release team never did it. (Mind you, I came into
the 2.0 process 'late' (six months before release?) but this was my
impression at the time- we were followers, not leaders.) Now you can
argue that this should now be done by the release team (since no one
else is doing it), but to say it was done by the release team is just
not historically correct, IMHO.

The roadmap process was first started by the board almost five years
ago ( http://markmail.org/message/ez35nwflj6wfmqg4 ). Again, probably
makes sense that it belongs to the release team now, and certainly was
restarted by the r-t more recently, but I just want to get the record
straight.

Heartily agree that there should be discussion of revamping the module
set idea. May be worth trolling through old r-t emails for that;
should be some discussion of it between jeff and I c. 2003 ;) At this
point it has been so long that I don't even remember what we were
planning to replace it with, just that it died on the altar of
perfect-the-enemy-of-the-good.

the 'hey, it is 2.30 therefore 3.0' thinking is silly, and will not
make for good marketing, any more than it has made for good marketing
for emacs. Dump it. :)

Maybe more of a 'call to action' in there? 'hey, you're all
unemployed, come help out' ;) May also be worth noting
RH/Ubuntu/(other?) support for shell, etc.


On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 12:16 PM, Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org> wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> Here's a draft of a mail about GNOME 3.0 to send to devel-announce-list.
> I sent a earlier draft this morning to some of you already (there were
> many notes that needed to be changed in sentences, though, so I didn't
> want to make this too public).
>
> FWIW, we need to publish the 2.27 schedule ASAP, and since the 2.27
> schedule is directly linked to the 2.29 one (both will be published at
> the same time) and to GNOME 3.0, Andre wanted hard to have some GNOME
> 3.0 stuff to explain the context and the plans. That's the goal of this
> text.
>
> Quick action is required since Andre wants to launch everything tonight
> ;-)
>
> (btw, we can probably add a few links here and there to the text; we
> just need to find them, so if someone has some free time...)
>
> Thanks,
>
> Vincent
>
> --
> Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés.
>
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