After collecting some feedback, the GNOME Release Team has finally decided on the release date for GNOME 3.0: It will be September 2010.
To take a look again at the GNOME 3 plan that was released in April 2009: Click here.

New module decisions for GNOME 2.30 were also made of course.

Just came back from the wonderful Vypsaná fixa album release party to see that there is yet another great GNOME major release available. Go check out the improvements and changes! Made to share!

Work on GNOME 3 is ongoing, of course.

(Picture by padro82, CC licensed)

Sometimes I wish GNOME had a bounty program (either separate or integrated in Bugzilla) so I could say “If you code this as an Evolution Plugin and it gets accepted by maintainers you get xxx EUR”. That idea is obviously still missing mentors that help the coder with implementation issues though.

Evolution Mail Composer

Current Dropdown:

New Dropdown:

New Context Menu:

Evolution Contacts

Currently:

New, with context menus:

Module proposal period for the next GNOME release has started!

If you are a maintainer of a module that you want to propose for official inclusion in GNOME: Do it now! See the wiki for the guidelines. Also note that you will receive slightly less negative feedback if you avoid using deprecated modules (libbonobo/ui, libgnome/ui, libgnomecanvas, libart_lpgl, gnome-vfs, libgnomeprint/ui, esound, orbit, libglade) and deprecated Glib and GTK+ symbols.

And now another (last?) GNOME 3 status update before 2.28 will hit the streets…
See also the cleanup stats and the 2.27/2.29 schedule.

Killing Bonobo

If I got everything right I could create the following categories for the GNOME modules that still depend on Bonobo/Orbit:

• A11Y
  
  This seems to cover orca, dasher, gok, mousetweaks, accerciser and gnome-session. At-spi, gnome-mag and gnome-speech might die and get replaced by at-spi2, gnome-shell and speech-dispatcher. libgail-gnome has already died by getting integrated into gtk+ (Orca was the last consumer and got fixed two weeks ago).
  See here for a general overview.
• gnome-panel
  
  gnome-panel blocks the Bonobo dependencies of bug-buddy, gnome-applets, seahorse-plugins, pessulus, sabayon, gdm, and empathy. It is likely that gnome-panel will get replaced by gnome-shell for GNOME 3 (but there is no final decision yet).
• Evolution, Evolution-Data-Server, Evolution-Exchange
  
  Evolution and friends just branched for GNOME 2.28.x so the kill-bonobo and dbus-hybrid branches now can get merged into (unstable) master. After that it will be a bit easier to see how much work is left.
• gconf
  
  Probably very ugly to fix. dconf might be quite ready (but developers a bit too silent in communicating that). Crossing fingers for a status report. It could also make sense to switch to the gconf-dbus branch in the meantime.
• Legacy
  
  • gnome-python-desktop (as a binding)
  • glade3 (as a tool to create applications)
• Other modules that are not officially part of GNOME
  
  Wondering about atomix, balsa, ghex, gnumeric, gossip and gthumb.
  Bug reports are mostly filed (yes, we also do care about warning the maintainers of modules that use deprecated functionality and are not officially part of GNOME despite of sometimes unfriendly “I don’t care about your GNOME3 stuff, why did you file this at all?” answers).
  Planner has a patch awaiting review/commit.

Killing deprecated GTK+/Glib symbols

• gnome-games currently looks worst. It depends on the release of a new ggz tarball now that ggz patches have landed.
• metacity seems to be in need of more love – patches welcome which might be partially shared with mutter.
• gedit is a bit reluctant to get in the patches too early because it would change UI behaviour. Understandable.

Killing libglade

The aim for August 24 is to have less than 10 modules still depending on libglade. Currently we still have 16 modules left (only very few of them blocked by the gnome-druid migration that has to happen first). If you want to help you should provide a patch. Here’s a how-to.

Killing libgnome and libgnomeui

Apart from the bindings there are not many applications left (yelp, gnome-control-center and gok got ported in the last days), but we all know that the last steps are always the hardest ones, right?

• libgnome:
  evolution, tomboy, gconf (just removing an unused file).
• libgnomeui:
  evolution, evolution-exchange, gnome-panel, gnome-shell.

A gnome-shell release

A fresh and cool tarball is now available.

Killing libgnomecanvas

Evolution heavily depends on libgnomecanvas. It is highly unlikely that this code will be rewritten for GNOME 3 so libgnomecanvas can either be kept deprecated but shipped in GNOME 3, or Evolution copies the code to its internal codebase. Note though that libgnomecanvas itself heavily depends on libart_lgpl which is also deprecated.

GSeal

A rather unknown variable in the current equation as GTK+ does not have everything in place yet, hence it is currently still a moving target. See the wiki for more information and how to compile your module with the GSEAL macro. Maintainers are highly encouraged to try.
In general curious about the GTK+ status with regard to version 3. Hope to see an update about this next week.

Personal opinions on interesting modules

Modules that interest me and that could be interesting for GNOME 3 or later in alphabetic order and without any claim for completeness are:
dconf, gnome-do, gnome-global-menu, gnome-packagekit, gnome-scan, gnome-shell, tracker, vala, zeitgeist.
Just wanted to write this down somewhere as I tend to empty my brain on a weekly basis.

To summarize the important decisions:

• Bug reports in GNOME Bugzilla (not: enhancement requests) with 1 year without any activity will be set to NEEDINFO state and reporters will be asked to update the report’s status by testing again on a recent GNOME version. After 6 weeks without response these reports can be closed as RESOLVED INCOMPLETE. A new stock answer will be made available for this.
• There are many modules in GNOME Bugzilla that have not seen any code changes for years (except for translation updates). Bugsquad members will try to identify those obsolete/unmaintained modules and contact the maintainers. We expect a response within four weeks from the maintainers. Without a response the remaining reports will probably be closed as WONTFIX while explaining to the reporter that the module is not maintained anymore and will not receive any updates. I must admit that I have done this already before and complaints were fairly low (2 people when I mass-closed open gnome-vfs enhancement requests) or non-existing (e.g. when closing all open Scaffold bugs).
• The “FIXED” stock answers will kindly ask bug reporters to verify the fix once it has landed in their distribution and if they have some time. The specific stock answers will be updated accordingly.

It was nice to discuss best practices and policies to have a less messy GNOME Bugzilla. Looking forward to our next meeting.

And PS: Hi to the Planet Fedora desktop readers.

This status report refers to the aims listed in the 2.27/2.29 schedule and the automatic statistics available.

PROBLEMS

• We have gconf-dbus in the Mobile set, but it looks dead, plus gconf itself has much better stats. So is this officially dead?
• Still need a solution for deprecations in bindings (fredp?)
• LibEggSMClient vs Session management in GTK+
• Pending GTK+ sealings
• Creation of thumbnails, as libgnomeui is deprecated (cf. this bug)

STATUS OF TASKS

Clear a11y plan and schedule for 3.0

Willie just updated the wiki page.

Less than 9 modules depending on libgnome

NOT COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.3: 15->9).

• low: 7 ((gnome-python-desktop), yelp, gconf, (glade3), gconf-dbus, (gnome-python), (gnome-sharp))
• average: 2 (Evolution, gok)
• complex: 0
• PATCHES awaiting review by maintainers: yelp

Less than 9 modules depending on libgnomeui

NOT COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.3: 12->10).

• low: 7 (gnome-control-center, evolution-exchange, (gnome-python-desktop), libgail-gnome which is required by Orca, yelp, (glade3), (gnome-python))
• average: 2 (gnome-panel, gok)
• complex: 1 (Evolution)

Less than 20 modules depending on libglade

COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.3: 32->19).

• low: 12
• average: 5 (gnome-control-center, dasher, gnome-media, gnome-panel, gok)
• complex: 1 (Evolution)
• PATCHES awaiting review by maintainers: gnome-media, gnome-panel, sound-juicer

Less than 5 modules with non-low Gtk-Deprecated-Symbols

NOT COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.3: 9->6).

• low: 6
• average: 5 (Evolution, gedit, metacity, gconf-dbus, (pygtk))
• complex: 1 (gnome-games)
• PATCHES awaiting review by maintainers: metacity

Less than 15 modules total with Gtk-Deprecated-Symbols

COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.3: 17->12).
See above.

HOW TO HELP

For example you should help kill libgnome(ui) by providing a patch. It’s quite often only a few lines.
If you’ve already patched a module to get rid of stuff like gnome-ui-init, gnome-icon-entry, gnome-app, gnome-program, gnome-client, gnome-macros or gnome-druid see the wiki for a list of other apps still using these.

• provides links to all the resources you need in order to help
• lists todo items for getting rid of libgnome(ui) sorted by functionality (header includes) instead of modules.

The latter should be useful for contributors that are willing to help by fixing one specific libgnome(ui) functionality – learn once, fix several modules. Partial patches for the listed bug reports are welcome!

And for more ways to help see Fred’s automatic stats. As always.
Happy hacking!

Today David J.Daniel G. Siegel and me gave a talk at GCDS named “Google Summer of Code & Highly Open Participation Contest: How successful is GNOME?”.
The slides are available here (PDF, 5.2MB).

The discussion after our talk basically boiled down to two issues:

• How to keep more of the students in our community after GSoC
• How to integrate more of the code that was written for GSoC

Some of the feedback I got after the talk and at the Nokia party in the evening:

• Tobi said that more feedback on the weekly GSoC reports written by the students could be helpful to strengthen the feeling that there is interest in their work.
• In case that the GSoC mentor is not also the module maintainer Cosimo proposed that an OK by the affected module maintainer should be required first to make sure that the GSoC code will be welcome (sometimes maintainers have other ideas and concepts about architecture or the path their project should take).
• GSoC code is not integrated into the next GNOME version because of the GNOME release schedule. Hence it takes at least 9 months until the results are included in a stable release.
  There’s no solution to this as both Google and GNOME do not intend to change their schedules.
• Diego said that there should also be an email to the corresponding project mailinglist/maintainer and/or a blog post by the mentor of the student that introduces the student.
• Björn said that integrating people into our community might be improved by also using social networks like Facebook.

General GCDS comments

• It’s hot and sweaty and I got a slight sunburn. Expected though. I’m good in getting them.
• Makes me very happy to meet with so many friends, colleagues and people again for talking about code, projects, real life. Grateful to be part of this great open source community (which means GNOME, KDE and freedesktop.org here).
• The venue has a terrace right to the sea – the smell is beautiful and yesterday we went swimming in the Atlantic ocean around midnight. Priceless.
• Maemo Harmattan switching from GTK+ to Qt by default. After talking to several people I am not yet sure what to think about it.
• Richard Stallman’s keynote. I must admit that I am biased as I don’t share his point of view on C# and parts of his ideology. So to me this was somewhere between a leader talking to his sect and a children’s birthday (I missed playing “Hit the Pot” after singing the Free Software song together). Potentially misogynistic “jokes” (Lefty described it quite well) made it even worse. In doubt I hope that it was not his intention. I was a bit reminded of Michael Jackson – awesome artist and great work in the past but let’s forget about the last years please.
• GNOME 3 status talk tomorrow trying to cover most of the recent activities and plans. Let’s get the big picture to see where we are.

Microblogging

Henri tricked me at the GCDS Welcoming Party into promising him that I am going to start using Qaiku as I am the only person left using the maemo.org wiki for his activity reports. I still don’t feel comfortable with microblogging. I have a Twitter account (just needed it for reproducing some bugs on the N810) but I do not use it at all (and never intended) as the signal vs. noise ratio seems way too high (also see Stormy’s post about that and other issues with microblogging). I admit that it can be useful though. Time will tell.