3.18 topics: application revival

[Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>]

Hi,

in recent discussions between Allan and me, we've discussed the fact
that we have a bit of an 'application problem' - we did get a whole a
bunch of new applications started.

Documents, Contacts, Photos, Boxes, Music, Notes, Polari, Builder,
Software, Characters,...

But only a subset of those has reached 'critical mass' in terms of
features and usefulness (personally counting boxes, software and
polari here, but thats a bit subjective.

Some of the others are unfortunately stalled or stagnant. In some
cases, maintainers are lacking and patches are rotting in bugzilla. In
other cases, we just don't have experienced enough developers around
to lift the apps 'over the threshold' of usefulness.

Maybe we do something to improve this situation, from the release team
? Some ideas I had:

1) Patch review days - ask the community to spend a day focused just
on bugs and patches of one app, with the goal of working through the
backlog and making visible progress. In cases where maintainers have
gone missing, we may need to find volunteers to lead this ?

2) Call out "5 easy tasks" for an app. Provide some design guidance,
and promise the prospective contributors that we'll ensure timely
review.

3) Anything else ? I'm sure I had another idea, but blanking now...


Another topic we should discuss this cycle: Cutting dead wood from our
application list. The prime example here is empathy - nothing
significant has happened in empathy for a long time.
A prerequisite for dropping empathy is to remove the remaining support
for chat notifications in gnome-shell.