Fwd: Re: Team updates needed for the 2010 Q1 GNOME Quarterly Report by Wednesday, April 14th

[Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org>]

FIY, the r-t report for Q1.

Vincent

----- Forwarded message from Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org> -----

Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2010 08:16:28 +0200
From: Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org>
To: Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org>
Cc: Andreas Nilsson <nisses mail home se>,
	Calum Benson <Calum Benson sun com>, Andre Klapper <ak-47 gmx net>,
	Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>, Lucas Rocha <lucasr gnome org>,
	SimosLists gmail com, Bruno Boaventura <brunoboaventura gmail com>,
	Germán Póo-Caamaño <gpoo gnome org>, shaunm <shaunm gnome org>,
	Tobias Mueller <tobiasmue gnome org>,
	Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron sun com>,
	Marina Zhurakhinskaya <marinaz redhat com>,
	Bharath <abharath novell com>,
	"paul r cutler gmail com" <pcutler gnome org>,
	Vinicius Depizzol <vdepizzol gmail com>, suserocks bryen com,
	Claude Paroz <claude 2xlibre net>
Subject: Re: Team updates needed for the 2010 Q1 GNOME Quarterly Report by
	Wednesday, April 14th

Le mardi 20 avril 2010, à 12:01 -0600, Stormy Peters a écrit :
> Thanks everyone for your updates!! Please review the attached draft for
> correctness.
> 
> As soon as I have the release team and a11y team reports - hopefully tonight
> - (and Vinicius does some design magic), we will publish.

Here's the release team report.

Vincent

=================

The main focus in the beginning of 2010 was the final sprint towards the last major release of the GNOME 2.x cycle. With two development releases, two beta releases, one release candidate, the start of all the usual freezes and a good number of freeze break requests, the three months of Q1 illustrated well the broad work accomplished by the whole community for GNOME 2.30.0. This effort lead to the successful release of 2.30.0 on March 29th. The release notes highlight some of the new features or good improvements in this release: sending files easily to contacts, improved file management, better experience for instant messaging, dbus-based gnome-keyring (using a protocol that will be shared with KDE), etc.

Obviously, the release team did not just work on getting GNOME 2.30.0 out, but also laid some foundations for the next cycle. As a first step, an initial draft of the 2.31/3.0 development cycle was published, and after some adjustments, got announced. Continuing our long-standing tradition of six-months release cycles, GNOME 3.0.0 will be out on September 29th.

The period for new module proposals opened in February, with some initial discussion from the community. This instance is obviously a bit different compared to previous module proposal periods since the next release is GNOME 3.0 and the new modules will receive even more spotlight than usual. The proposed modules include the expected clutter and gnome-shell, as well as various applications: deja-dup (a backup tool), mousetrap (an accessibility tool to control the mouse cursor), pdfmod (an application to modify PDF files), rygel (a collection of DLNA services) and simple-scan (a scanning tool). Other modules might still get proposed as the period for module proposals closes at the beginning of May.

An important area the release team wanted to explore for 3.0 is the reorganization of the modulesets. As of today, we have the Platform, the Desktop, the Bindings, the Administrator Suite and the Developer Tools. This model has served us well and has actually evolved with time (we didn't have the Administrator Suite and the Developer Tools at first). However, we feel that this organization is reaching its limits, and we have explored several potential changes. A sample of issues illustrate the need for an evolution here. First, the arbitrary separation between the Platform and the Bindings can lead people to think that the bindings are second-class citizen while this is certainly not the case. Another issue that we want to address is that the Desktop set has expanded so much that it's now unclear which type of application should go in and which shouldn't; it's also forcing us to choose one application over another, or to avoid this choice, like in the famous Rhythmbox vs Banshee case. Moreover, we strongly b
elieve that we should encourage a strong ecosystem of applications around GNOME, and integrating all applications in the GNOME Desktop moduleset is not the best way to achieve this.

In the next quarter, GNOME will release two 2.30 stable releases, effectively marking the end of the 2.x cycle. Of course, most of the community is already heavily involved in the 2.31 development cycle that will lead to GNOME 3.0 a few months after GUADEC!

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----- End forwarded message -----

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