Call to release team: Open shop on GNOME 3.0 planning!
October 22, 2008 2:48 pm freesoftware, gnomevuntz has blogged today about some of the brainstorming that has come out of the Summit this year – and that’s great. The Summit’s an important chance to get a lot of focussed work done.
It’s a start on the road to a GNOME 3.0, but it’s not enough. what I’d like to see happen now, if the Release Team (and indeed the GNOME community) is serious about implementing a two-step 4/4 beat in the project, where every 2 to 3 years we have a major version, and we continue with our 6 month drives, then we need to get serious about co-ordinating those major feature arcs.
I’ve discussed this a few times in private, but nothing’s been announced – so as I threatened to do at the JDLL, here’s what I think that the release team should do: Open a consultation period when the community proposes major themes/feature arcs for the desktop – proposals might be conservative or ambitious, it doesn’t matter. They should be realistic, but exciting and over-arching.
Some examples I can think of are “Integrate with web services where appropriate” – and give examples of the web services and applications in question – or “Make contacts first class objects” – and show the interface for this, how we start to depend on libsoylent, various applications that include presence, more than just throwing out an idea, getting concrete about what needs to be done for the feature arc.
After the (short) consultation period, the release team announces the theme for GNOME 3.0, consults with the various maintainers concerned to ensure we’re all on the same page, and that major features are added to the mid-term roadmaps of all the applications concerned. And then magic happens, code gets written, and we have a major new feature arc for our desktop in 1 to 2 years time.
Rinse, repeat, every 2 years or so – in the run-up to a major release, we pick a new major feature arc and drive for that. In the absence of this kind of co-ordination, we will continue to have the kind of piecemeal progress that we’ve seen over the past few years – all our apps are improving, the GNOME experience is better than ever, but we don’t have a story to tell.
October 22nd, 2008 at 4:35 pm
“…where every 2 to 3 years we have a major version…”
Not sure what the result will be in the end, but I’d like to mention that it would be very nice if latest versions of Gnome apps could still be compiled and run on older Gnome desktops (for example, at work we have RHEL51 at the moment, with Gnome 2.16, and will probably stay with that for another year). I have no idea how the planned release cycle affects this, but wanted to mention this so Gnome devs at least know about this wish 🙂
October 22nd, 2008 at 6:23 pm
FYI: We (r-t) will have a meeting this weekend and one of the main topics is the roadmapping process for 3.0. Thanks for the ideas!
October 22nd, 2008 at 6:30 pm
http://brainstorm.gnome.org/ just like http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/ ??
October 22nd, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Yep, you’re 100% right and I’m happy you’re pushing us to move faster 🙂
October 22nd, 2008 at 9:53 pm
What others said. We’ve been slacking.. but aside from general guidelines I pretty much like the ideas to come from the community.
Giacomo: I don’t like ‘brainstorm’ (the suggestions such a site attracts). For e.g. what is currently being discussed on pgo you need to work with mockups. Test with users, etc. We already have enhancement bugs in Bugzilla and IMO maintainers know the various suggestions for their modules.
October 23rd, 2008 at 7:38 pm
Brainstorm is a good example of argumentum ad populum. It’s based on false logic, which is very dangerous. The main reason why those sites exist is venting and building network effects (communities), and how they work as marketing tool. They are not even remotely useful in developing visions.