[Shotwell] Yorba info, specially from Shotwell

[Adam Dingle]

On 04/25/2012 07:33 AM, Xavi wrote:
> Hi Yorba team !!
>
> (I'm not asking for a job :) )
>
> My name is Xavi Viader, I'm placed in Barcelona (Spain) and I'm a 
> Shotwell supporter. Until shotwell (0.6 for me) I wasn't comfortable 
> with any photo manger projects. So thanks for your initiative !!

Glad you like Shotwell!

>
> I got a Compurter Science degrees some years ago and now I'm 
> continuing my studies doing a Free Software Master. Some days ago I 
> wrote to the email-list asking about copyright assigments and license 
> issue (adam answer clerly everything). Now we have to choose a free 
> software project and explain lots of things about it. My team has 
> choosen shotwell because of me and because I do really thing that 
> projects like shotwell has to be know like an example for others. It's 
> plenty of free software projects but, in my opinion, most of them 
> aren't well polished like shotwell... anyway... do you mind if during 
> the next month (may) we ask you some questions to know everything 
> about Shotwell project (that could be known ;)  )?

Sure - we're happy to answer your questions.  I'm sending this response 
to the public Shotwell mailing list in case the answers will be of 
interest to the wider Shotwell community.

> Do you prefer from me writing to the list or choose one of you?

It's probably best to write to shotwell at yorba.org to email the whole 
Shotwell team at Yorba.  Or you can email the public list.

>
> I hope you don't mind If I start right now some SHORT questions :P
>
> I PROMISE the the NEXT EMAILS would have much less !!
>
> A- Why you (or who was at the begining) start Shotwell project 
> (motivations)?

We started Shotwell back in March 2009 when Yorba was just 2 people: me 
and Jim Nelson (Yorba's most senior engineer).  Jim had recently 
returned from a trip to Europe with a whole bunch of photos to organize. 
  He and I looked at a bunch of existing free photo managers and weren't 
satisfied with anything we found, so we decided to start a new project.

> B- How you would describe Shotwell apart from this?
>     - non-destructive photo editor
>     - photo manager
>     - ...

I think those terms are accurate.

>
> C- Do you have any visual identification for the project apart from 
> the blue, red, green pictures? Why some desktops changes your 'icon' logo?

The blue/red/green pictures in the Shotwell icon reflect the Yorba logo, 
which also includes red, blue and green.  I think we originally chose 
those colors because they're the colors of pixels on an LCD monitor, so 
they reflect digital media in general which has been Yorba's overall focus.

The only other visual identification for our project is found in the 
About box in Shotwell - it's a picture that Jim took of a sign on 
Shotwell Street in San Francisco, just a few blocks from the Yorba office.

Different desktops have different looks for their icons - some of them 
may want more muted colors rather than the primary colors in the 
Shotwell icon.  If they want to change the icon that's OK with us.


>
> D- Anybody else at Shotwell project (or Yorba) apart from you five 
> (http://yorba.org/about/)? Have you got ""main"" contributors? Names?

Jim Nelson was the original engineer for Shotwell and served as its tech 
lead for the first couple of years.  These days, Jim has moved on to 
other projects at Yorba (namely Geary - 
see http://redmine.yorba.org/projects/geary/wiki).  The active Shotwell 
developers at Yorba today are Lucas Beeler (the current tech lead) and 
Clinton Rogers.

>
> E- We need some information about the main developers (so you five). 
> We need to know the original country, age, professional and studies 
> background. We've found some info at your website and in
> Adam Dingle 
> http://elementaryos.org/journal/yorba-founder-software-engineer-adam-dingleLucas 
> Beeler http://reengagement.wordpress.com/
> But we don't know too much about Jim, Eric and Clinton apart from 
> Yorba about.

All of us who work at Yorba are from the USA.  The interview you linked 
to tells a bit about my background, and there's also some information on 
our About page as you saw.  I won't send personal information about our 
employees (e.g. age, academic background) out of respect for their 
privacy, but if any of them want to send more information about 
themselves (either on this thread or to you directly) they are certainly 
welcome to do so.

>
> F- how is organised shotwell project? Who decides everything? All 5 
> voting? Board directors? Or director (?) ? What is your rol at 
> Shotwell project (not just Yorba)

I'm the product manager for Shotwell: when we need to make a decision 
about how it should look or behave, we all discuss it but then I make 
the final decision (often that's easy since everyone agrees anyway).  I 
also lead the process of deciding which features to develop in each 
release, with lots of input from the team of course.  Lucas is the tech 
lead: when we need to make a decision about an algorithm or data 
structure or anything in the code, the engineers discuss it and Lucas 
makes the call.


>
> G- Which IT infrastructure do you use? Repositories?

We host our own git repositories at yorba.org.

> Distribution list?

We use GNU Mailman to host our mailing lists.

> Wikis (readmine)?

Yes - our wikis live on our Redmine server.

> Blogs?

We use Wordpress to host the Yorba blogs at blog.yorba.org.

> ...? Are they Shotwell internal or for all contributors?
> http://redmine.yorba.org/projects/shotwell/wiki

Anyone is welcome to make constructive edits to the Yorba wikis.

> H- I know shotwell is quite active right now, isn't it? Which is the 
> main issue your are working? JPG deprecation?

First of all, I really hope you realize that the JPEG deprecation we 
announced was an April Fool's joke!

http://blog.yorba.org/eric/2012/04/shotwell-0-13-to-become-a-lossless-only-photo-manager-drop-jpeg-support.html

I think Shotwell will support the JPEG format for a very long time to 
come.  :)

Shotwell's development is moderately active at this time.  I'd love to 
have more engineers on the project, but our resources at Yorba are 
limited and so we do what we can.  The Shotwell road map 
(http://redmine.yorba.org/projects/shotwell/roadmap) lists features 
we're considering for the next release, namely 0.13.  That's still 
preliminary, though.  At the moment I think that 0.13 will probably have 
a number of modest improvements (e.g. red eye while zooming, improved 
RAW+JPEG support, multiple tag selection) rather than any overwhelming 
whiz-bang feature.  But we'll see.

>
> I- What about the other projects like Valencia, Lombard, Fillmore... 
> are they still very active? Have you lots of contributions?

Lombard and Fillmore have been completely inactive for the last year and 
a half.  In the next couple of weeks we're planning to launch a new Web 
site with only Shotwell and Geary on the home page; that's long 
overdue.  I hope we can resurrect Lombard and/or Fillmore some day.  
Valencia is a programmer tool - I find it quite useful, but it could use 
some bug fixing and we haven't done a release in a while.  We've had 
very few external contributions to any of these projects.

>
> J-  Could you please give us two or three example about third 
> contributions? example, mr X did this for shotwell

Bruno Girin has been an outstanding contributor to Shotwell - he 
implemented F-Spot importing and has made a bunch of improvements to 
Piwigo publishing, for example. Jani Monoses wrote the code to upload 
videos to YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and PicasaWeb.  Last summer, 
Valentín Barros worked on Shotwell as a Google Summer of Code student 
and made good progress toward a feature that lets you mark faces in 
photos in Shotwell.  That hasn't landed in trunk yet, but Valentín was 
just accepted to continue his work as part of Summer of Code again this 
summer and I'm optimistic that his contribution will land soon.

>
> K- About the money !! Do you just finance shotwell (or yorba) from 
> donations? Don't you get any extra help from companies (money, 
> knowledge, tables, pencil, hours from their workers,...)?

Today, Yorba survives by doing contract programming work developing 
software which will be released as open source someday (I can't say much 
more about that due to client confidentiality), and via donations.  
Major distributions such as Ubuntu give us lots of help in the form of 
bug reports. Tables, pencils, and hours of programming time mostly come 
from us at Yorba, however.  :)

>
> L- I know that Yorba is 'a non-profit software group'. Does it mean 
> your a little company?

There are 8 of us working at Yorba right now including myself.  We'll 
have a student engineering intern in the office this summer as well.

>
> M- I know Ubuntu is the main distro you are focused (and Fedora?), 
> don't you? Why you choose ubuntu ? Why don't you focus in Debian, for 
> example?

Yorba isn't focused on any particular distribution.  Ubuntu is popular 
right now and so it does get a lot of our attention (and we provide a 
Yorba PPA for Ubuntu users, for example) but we want Shotwell to run 
well on all major GNOME-based distros including Debian, Fedora and 
others.  We're enduringly grateful to Fedora for being the first major 
distribution to adopt Shotwell as its default photo manager.

>
> N- You give """suport""" for the current and previous Ubuntu version, 
> is that true?

We do try to ensure that each Shotwell release runs well on the previous 
two releases of GNOME and of popular distributions derived from it.  For 
example, Shotwell 0.12 should run with GNOME 3.2 or later, Fedora 16 or 
later, and Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric) or later.

adam