Re: Team updates needed for the 2010 Q2 GNOME Quarterly Report by July 16th

[Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org>]

Hi Stormy,

Le jeudi 08 juillet 2010, à 07:45 -0600, Stormy Peters a écrit :
> Thanks everyone for your help with past reports - we continue to get
> positive feedback! It's time for the Q2, April-June, 2010 report.

Here's the report from the release team. I'm very sorry for the
lateness :/

(Some proofreading might be needed, I'm in a hurry before I leave for a
few days)

Vincent

=====
Since the release of GNOME 2.30.0 occurred on the very last day of the first quarter of 2010, the very first action taken by the release team in Q2 was to enjoy some time to celebrate this release. And an hour later, the team looked at the plans for the next few months and started working on the next releases. This includes the 2.31 development cycle, as well as two stable releases of GNOME 2.30 that went out, the first in April and the second in May, and that were integrated by our distributors.

One of the main activities of the quarter was the monitoring of the development of GNOME 3. At the platform level, new APIs like GSettings and GDBus, landed in our libraries, and the version development versions of GTK+ 3 were released; this triggered the beginning of the migration to those new technologies for various modules. In addition, we continued pushing the cleanup work to remove the use of deprecated libraries in our applications. At the user experience level, we evaluated the progress of GNOME Shell, as well as other components having critical changes for GNOME 3, like the control center. In addition, several discussions were held with maintainers of those components to get more information on the remaining work to be done.

One strength of GNOME that we are proud of is that it's usable on various operating systems, based on different kernels. However, this generally requires some work since GNOME needs low-level integration to offer a good experience for hardware support and multimedia. To help with this, the release team created the portability matrix: this is a document collecting in one place the information of what work is required to port GNOME, as well as the current status of the various ports.

Finally, the release team continued the work on the reorganization of the modulesets. A proposal based on two main ideas was sent to the community. The first point was to extend our platform by including bindings in the platform as well as adding libraries that do not offer API/ABI stability yet but that are aimed to live in the platform (this includes GStreamer, part of the telepathy stack or evolution-data-server, for example). The core platform would still be offer API/ABI stability. The second point was to refocus the Desktop moduleset on core components, and to have normal applications live outside the moduleset. The idea behind this point was to extend the GNOME brand and encourage a rich ecosystem of GNOME applications, and bootstrap this effort with our high-quality applications that are shipped as part of GNOME. The community generally liked the reorganization of the platform, but raised various issues about the second point. Some additional work will be done in the next quarters to find a solution that addresses those issues.

This work on the modulesets reorganization influenced the decisions of new modules approved for this cycle: great applications (deja-dup, pdfmod, simple-scan) were proposed, but not accepted because we want to encourage the growth of an application ecosystem around GNOME. But new features like color management, UPnP support and symbolic icons will be part of GNOME thanks to gnome-color-manager, Rygel and gnomee-icon-theme-symbolic. Caribou will also replace gok as the on-screen keyboard, and last but not least, the GNOME Shell was officially approved for integration.

The next quarter will be a critical one since it will lead to the release of the next stable branch of GNOME. GUADEC will be most useful for the release team, since most contributors will be present in the Hague, and help evaluate us where we stand in the middle of this development cycle!
=====

Vincent

-- 
Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés.