Got yesterday back from Boston, after 8 days there, first on a Novell’s desktop team meeting, and then, for the summit.
It was a great week, first because of the high productivity achieved during the desktop team meeting. It really makes a difference to have all your coworkers near and discuss about what everyone is doing. I would really like to have the Boston office closer to where I live, so that I could go many days to work there. Unfortunately, teletransportation hasn’t been invented yet 🙁
Then, the summit was also great. In the last few months, I have come to the conclusion that I don’t like conferences as I used to, but on the other hand, I love more and more this kind of meetings, where all interested people get together for sharing ideas, discussions and hacking. As Luis says, it would be really nice to do some more specialized meetings for getting groups of people to work on something for a weekend.
As for the interesting things about the summit, here are some:
- People seem to be worried about performance, so expect lots of improvements in this front for the next few weeks. Let’s hope we succeed in creating some sort of GNOME Performance Team, to continously run tests on applications and libraries.
- Mark committed his new session manager during the summit. It is a complete rewrite of gnome-session, using the services vs applications separation mechanism we talked about in the gnome-session BOF. As discussed during that BOF, it is missing XSMP support, which we should be adding soon. Some other details, like playing login sounds, are also missing.
One other nice thing about it is that it already includes all the infrastructure to autostart services/applications, so we should not need anymore to hard-code programs to be started on the session.
I will be testing it in the following few days, but so far the code looked quite better than the old one, much cleaner and much easier to read. Not sure what people will think about a rewrite though.
- John showed us (Christian and myself) his rewrite of libnotify. While I like the new API (much more GObject-oriented and cleaner to use than the old one), I still prefer the visual style of the original version from Christian. Hopefully the code will be in GNOME CVS soon, so that we can have everyone’s opinions before going further, as to avoid having disagreements when the code lands on some core GNOME module.
- Lots of Novell projects were announced: BetterDesktop, Tango icon theme, Banshee.
- As a result of my recent work in trying to improve GNOME startup time, I applied, along with Rodney and Chris Lahey, for maintainership of gnome-control-center. This means I will continue working on my patches for improving gnome-settings-daemon in the next few weeks, to make startup in 2.14 much quicker.
- Federico is a great guide for restaurants in Boston. If you are in Boston, just follow him at dinner time, you will get great food. He took us once to an Ethiopian restaurant, which was just delicious, and other day, to a nice, smallish, very mediterranean-like, Italian restaurant, where we had another great dinner.
As always, the best thing on these meetings was to meet again all the nice guys, apart from meeting new ones. I won’t try to mention everyone, since I’ll probably forget someone, but I can’t resist mentioning how happy I was to see again, after more than 3 years, Duncan. Although I just saw him for a few minutes on Sunday, it was very nice to see him again.