GNOMG

Montreal Summit report

October 15, 2011 1:01 am karen conferences, stuffdone

The Montreal Summit turned out to be a very fun and productive gathering last weekend. With the 3.2 release behind us, much of the discussions were at a pretty high level, and there was a lot of discussion about the state of GNOME and its path going forward. This was reflected in both the technical and non-technical sessions that were held.

The team present went through all of the features for GNOME 3.3/3.4 and discussed kicking off the 3.3 cycle generally. The discussion dovetailed nicely with the discussions currently underway on the mailing lists. There were presentations on Baserock by Lars Wirzenius, jhbuild by Colin Walters, as well as a number of sessions that facilitated discussion on matters related to GNOME strategy, one on the application menu, with canonical contributing a good chunk of code toward an improved application menu, and one led by Marina Zhurakhinskaya on Google’s Summer of Code program and how to improve and maximize GNOME’s participation in it. There was a lot of great brainstorming and coming to agreement on all sorts of issues. There was so much going on that even though the event wasn’t huge there were some people there that I never even got the chance to talk to and I’m sure there was a lot accomplished that I didn’t even know about (for example, Olivier Crête tells me that he made a fix to again allow the use of the free Theora codec for VoIP calls in Empathy). Other blogs by GNOME hackers give more detailed views on their participation at the Summit:

• Matthias Clasen blogged about his work during and after the Summit to modernize the deprecation system in GLib and GTK+ by using annotations.
• Frederic Peters wrote an overview.
• Jean-François Fortin Tam wrote about his experience at the Summit, including talking to Olivier Crète, Guillaume Desmottes, Robert Ancell and others including me!
• Tiffany Antopolski recapped the GNOME strategy session.
• Behdad Esfahbod pointed out that there were quite a few new participants that got their start with the GNOME Women’s Outreach Program.

Many thanks to the sponsors who made this event possible: