GNOME has a lot of insufficiently praised heroes. There are far too many to name individually, which usually means that I don’t name any of them at all. But I thought I’d try to fix that a little bit and just mention a few with recent examples of their heroics:
- Vincent and Kjartan. Both of them as well as I mentioned that we might be able to help with the GNOME 2.17.1 release but all of us had some tough time constraints; them more than me. No one committed firmly. So, all three of us felt responsible. Sadly, it meant that all three of us basically did 95% of the work of the release, duplicating a lot of effort before realizing that we had all done it separately. I happened to finish first and did the announcement, but they did as much work. While it’s kind of sad to see the unnecessary duplication, it’s inspiring seeing others make sacrifices for the community.
- Joseph and Karsten (who need blogs). GARNOME really doesn’t get the press it deserves. These guys are filling a vital role and know the status of current tarball releases well enough that we in the release team tend to lean on them heavily.
- Karsten (who still needs a blog) and Andre (who also needs a blog). Have you seen bugzilla in the last month or so? The rockingly new easy-to-use bug-buddy (thanks Fer and Olav!) has meant a skyrocket in number of bugs reported — nearly triple what we used to get not so long ago. That’s great in some ways, but also means tons of new work. These two have been keeping things sane.
- Olav. GNOME Bugzilla rocks (especially in contrast to the current upstream version). Ultrazilla will continue that tradition. And upstream Bugzilla is going to benefit because of Olav’s heavy efforts to port our stuff upstream (an area that I have sadly neglected and have had difficulty finding time to do otherwise).