Life after the GNOME freeze

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel nuclecu unam mx>]

Hello hackers,

   Well, the freeze is about to happen, and some of you might find a
void empty in your hearts due to the lack of some code to modify
wildly.   The freeze right now applies to gnome-libs and gnome-core,
other modules will be gradually frozen. 

   There are still various sorts of changes that can be commited to
the GNOME CVS in the frozen modules.  If you are uncertain about a
patch you want to commit, please post your patch first to the
gnome-hackers@nuclecu.unam.mx mailing list to get approval.  

   Do not worry, hacking has not finished, there are many things to do
in the meantime and we will appreciate a lot your help on these
issues:

	- Balsa, the mail reader needs help.  We would be grateful if
	  you could help us finish the mail reader.

	- ORBit needs to provide a way to not block on message
	  reception (contact sopwith@cuc.edu for work on this area).

	- Session management:  Many gnome applications have Session
	  management, but many do not, or have problems.

	  We would like to ask everyone to try gnome-session and
	  start/stop their sessions and make sure every gnome
	  application that we will ship has a fully working session
	  management setup.

	- Localization of GNOME.  I have created a list to cordinate
	  the efforts of localization.

	     We need volunteers to localize the message catalogs (the
	     .po files in the GNOME distirbution)

	     We need volunteers to localize the .keys file (these are
	     the mime-type specific actions).

	     We need volunteers to localize the .desktop files.

	     To subscribe to the list, send a mail with a subject of
	     "subscribe" to gnome-i18n-request@nuclecu.unam.mx

	- Nice icons for the file manager.
	
	   We need 48x48 icons that are suitable for file types in the
	   file manager.  A complete list of the icons we need is on
	   the gnome-icons CVS module.  

	   Currently the file manager is using some very ugly and old
	   icons I found, and they need to be replaced. 

	   We would like to have the icons keep the spirit of the
	   current gnome icons.

	   If you have artistic talent, please let us know and share
	   your icons with us.

	 - API documentation

	   There is a setup for documenting the GNOME api

         - Bug fixes

	   During the next few days we will encounter many bug reports
	   about GNOME.  GNOME needs to be rock solid and has to be as
	   clean as possible.  

	   Commiting bug fixes is highly encouraged. 


	 - More file manager sugar

	   There are a number of features that we want to add to the
	   file manager, feel free to contact me for them (or look at
	   mc/gnome/gnome.TODO for details).

	 - Improving existing GNOME applications

	   There are a number of other GNOME applications that are not
	   yet frozen, improving them, and writing documentation for
	   them is also another thing you can do.

	 - Consistency.  

	   The applications should have a uniform menu system and
	   keybindings should be considered buggy and should be fixed
	   as soon as possible.

	 - Portability problems.

	   If GNOME does not compile on a platform, we are very
	   interested in getting patches to make it work on that
	   platform. 

I am sure this list is incomplete, please, feel free to comment on it.

Thanks a lot to all of the GNOME programmers that have worked so hard
during the past 16 months to make GNOME possible.

Best wishes,
Miguel.