Working together

[Frederic Peters <fpeters gnome org>]

Hi!

With new members,  the gnome 3 cycle beginning now, and with the
recent messages on desktop-devel-list, I thought we could benefit of
some time now to define what we want, collectively as the release
team, as pulling in different directions will be frustrating for us
all, and won't lead us anywhere.

There are many points of contention, I'll try to touch a good part of
them while giving my, personal and current, position. From there we
can each share our views, and build one that is common to the release
team.

But firstmost a possible view could well be that the release team
should only be a technical body, that follows a vision set by
different persons (the foundation board?).

I do not have that view, and will thus go on, and touch at the
"supermarket vs gnome os" issue now. I believe we have been shifting
from the former to the later over time, from GNOME 1 days where you
could pick your window manager, to GNOME 2 where it was Metacity (but
still as a standalone module, and a distributor could pick another),
to GNOME 3 where it's not possible to have the experience without
gnome-shell.

>From user configurable, to distro configurable, to integrated. We
pushed the slider, and I believe we should continue. (A big next step
will be application installation, a traditional ground of differences
between distributions.)

Still, different persons will have different opinions on the precise
position of the slider; I believe distributions are still major
players, bringing GNOME to the users, and they will want some places
for differentiation, and that's another slider, how much distanciation
from our designs do we give out explicitely (implicitely distributions
can do whatever they want, this is free software).

For a specific, in the recent discussion I am in favour of keeping the
possibility for externally developed control center panels, as
technically this doesn't cost us much (the API is really simple, and
we won't even pretend stability for it, and bug reports from patched
control center will reach bugzilla as much as bugs from external
panels).

But overruling maintainers? In this specific case I don't think it
would be needed, but still, if collectively we think we should provide
this extensibility I am of the opinion we could overrule them, yes,
this would be a rare event.

Apart those big questions on directions, there is still another one,
about modules in launchpad. I'd say I already have accounts on
freedesktop, 0pointer.de, or launchpad, and that this is inconvenient,
that I don't want to encourage modules to be scattered all around,
that we need some policy for modules developed in other platforms
(tarballs should still be pushed to ftp.gnome.org, a deal should be
done with our translation teams) but I do not mind more for launchpad
than the others, and in the case of deja-dup, given the possibility
for externally developed settings panels, I am fine if it stays on
launchpad.

This is for my brain dump on current issues, as written at the start
I'd like to have the release team somehow aligned, and that's not
necessarily on the opinions expressed here.



        Fred