It’s Time to Play The Music, It’s Time to Light The Lights

April 13, 2004 1:23 pm General

John, you see I’d just call that a workaround, but everyone seems to have different ideas of what is best. I like the idea of having custom feeds, but then I guess you need a way to publish the various topics that you might write blog entries about, and with 1,000,000’s of people blogging you get a staggering encylopedia of words. Yes, I too am seeing the amazing parallels with American TV. Scarey.

Jeff gives a pretty interesting commentary on the use cases and categorisation on what he calls ‘The Language Question’, and in his conclusion he asks the following questions – ‘Is Sun doing anything to get the community interested in Java? Not that I’ve seen. Mono may win over the community, not for legal or technical reasons, but simply through lack of attention from the Java camp. I wonder how close the Java and Desktop teams are within Sun’. This question has come up time and time again, and while so many people in Sun have focused heavily on the technical issues, they seem to have dropped the ball on the community. I don’t think this has ever been a ‘lack of attention’, more a reluctance to publically come out of a corner and defend their corner. My real feeling is that the Java camp isn’t a community to the same extents as GNOME, and could benefit from looking at our model. Sure, there is the JCP and a confusing mix of java.sun.com, java.net and java.com. It’s a good start, yet I’m saddened when I see no set of documentation writers writing good online user help, no translators adding translations for dozens of languages and no bug team triaging bugs on a daily basis and more of a traditional Sourceforge type setup. Okay, so the Java ‘community’ is so much larger than we could ever hope the GNOME community to be, and I’m probably being amazingly naive to expect otherwise. But to answer Jeff’s questions, yes, the Java and Desktop teams aren’t amazingly well aligned as they perhaps should be. The Java hackers aren’t desktop hackers, and the desktop hackers aren’t Java hackers, but the two groups are definitely starting to become more aware of each other and respecting each others concerns. Little steps, but all important ones.

Luis and Havoc have been discussing the delights of syncing with GNOME development and time based releases. It’s a discussion that I’m hugely interested in, having seen how many resources get sucked in to maintaining features locally, and making sure all the patches apply cleanly with an upgrade of the version tarball. For our GNOME 2.6 based release we seem to be doing a better job, with only 260 patches locally of which maybe 20 are feature based. Unfortunately, it’s hard to convince Sun about the merits of ‘FIXED UPSTREAM’, working primarily against trunk, using bugzilla as the main bug tracker and a bunch of other things that could potentially ease much pain. Still, worst of all is trying to convince people on the merits of ‘value add’ and with Novell, Red Hat and Sun being as competitive as ever, it’ll remain an exhaustive and demoralizing battle.

I’m still trying to define my role in Sun. I think I spend most of my time read and writing mail and blog entries. I think I need to move to California so that I’ll at least spend my time in meetings and feel like I’ve had a productive day, or something.

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