very rough pre-gep tentative new modules list

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

So, I hear Jeff's working on a 'gep' to make this more 'formal.' :) In
the meantime, I'd like to get the ball rolling by proposing the the
addition of the following components to the GNOME Desktop for the 2.2
release, presuming that by the appropriate freezes they've made
appropriate progress towards the goals and standards agreed upon in that
other gep that Jeff is apparently drafting. :) 

In other words, this is all incredibly tentative, but we want to get
moving on 2.2, and we believe that the following packages will move us a
long way towards becoming a complete and modern desktop, so... here they
are :) Note that /lots/ of discussion/argument/flaming/all of the above
is appropriate at this point- I'm sure we've overlooked at least one app
that has a strong argument for inclusion, and at least a couple of these
will require big leaps of faith (or of dependent libs) to be ready for
2.2. Discussion about the libs, the appropriateness of the inclusions,
and everything else, /needs/ to take place, but I believe that a
concrete list of apps and dependencies is one of the best places to
start this discussion from. So, without further BS-

*file roller: as many of you know, gnome-vfs and nautilus do not
necessarily handle tarballs and other compressed/zipped objects well.
File Roller (fileroller.sf.net) is a wonderful application for this
purpose that we hope will help bridge the gap in this area.

*galeon: Every modern desktop system ships with a browser; we feel we
should too, and we feel we've got the best one of all of them.
Unfortunately, a fully embeddable gtk2 mozilla may not be ready in time
for GNOME2.2, but the galeon team wants to work towards the 2.2 goal and
believe it'll be good practice for 2.4 if mozilla is not ready in time
for 2.2. 

*rhythmbox: most of you have probably heard of rhythmbox. It's another
app that wants to ambitiously aim for a 2.2 release, with the
understanding that the libs and the application itself may not be stable
in time for release. Both XP and OS/X come with apps like RB- we've got
a great one, so we should ship it if it is ready to go. Adds a gstreamer
dependency.

*totem: again, this is an app rapidly reaching maturity that still needs
love and would add a big dependency to the desktop. It's also something
that we need to do to have parity with the Big Boys and become a modern,
multi-media desktop. Would add a xine dependency, though there are hopes
that this would go away at some point in favor of gstreamer.
 
*gcalctool: a more powerful gtk calculator. It is not very GNOME-ish
ATM; otherwise it's superior to the current crop in many ways. 

*gnopernicus and gok: we believe strongly that we should continue the
push to become a fully Accessible desktop by including the gnome
accessibility tools, gnopernicus and gok. However, both of these apps
have a ways to go before they are 'friendly' to non-accessible users,
both in terms of interface and installation. Because a big part of the
goal of having these in the main distribution is to educate 'normal'
users, some progress on this front must be made before we can include
them.

This is clearly an ambitious list; we expect at least one and possibly
several of these apps won't be ready in time for 2.2. But because it is
easy to cut them loose so that they can focus on 2.4, we don't think
it's a problem to be ambitious and air out all the possible issues now.
So, go ahead, flame away for dependencies, or instability, or just
because we didn't include your favorite app. Or maybe even try to start
a constructive discussion. :) 

Luis