i just returned from boston summit. boston summit is always scheduled on canadian thanksgiving which usually means that i can’t attend, but this year i bit the bullet.

i’m glad i did.

the three days of the conference were perhaps the three most productive days i have spent at any event. the entire attendence was on the order of about 30-40 people. this allowed the format to be very informal, and the level of focus allowed by that was fantastic.

for me, one of the happiest things to report is that i had a “hallway track” talk with davidz, mclasen and wjt. a very nice conclusion came from this talk. the upshot of that conversion is that the following items are all likely to occur:

  • GVariant will be included in the next stable release of glib
  • GDBus will be included in the next stable release of glib
  • GDBus will be modified to be based on GVariant

already, davidz has ported GDBus to GVariant and he reports that it’s working very nicely. you can see that work in the gdbus-standalone git repository.

while in boston, i proposed dconf as a new module for GNOME 2.30. reception on d-d-l has been very positive. this means that the following two points are also likely:

  • GSettings will be included in the next stable release of glib
  • dconf will ship with GNOME 3.0

a couple of other things that really stuck out for me from the summit:

gnome-shell: it seemed to me that the number of people using gnome-shell on their laptops increased substantially over the course of the summit. i’ve personally switched over to using it full-time. it’s weird and a little bit strange, but there are some things about it that i really like. i’ve also been showing it to some “normal humans” since coming back and they think that it’s pretty cool too.

splinter: in case you haven’t heard, we now have patch review integrated into GNOME bugzilla. click the “review” button beside the patch. kudos to owen for this.

that’s all for this post. i have a couple of new projects that i’m working on as a result of the summit that i will talk about soon.