communication/information between forward-looking projects [was Re: Some info (Ref: GSOC 2008 advice)]

["Luis Villa" <luis tieguy org>]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 3:03 PM, Ketil Wendelbo Aanensen
<ketil w aanensen gmail com> wrote:
> Hi, I'm new on this list.
>
>  Luis Vila encouraged me to send some info to this list, so here goes:
>
>  Disclaimer: I'm not a developer, just an avid user of Gnome and
>  various eye candy. I especially follow Screenlets and AWN closely.

I firmly believe that people who communicate information between
developers can be just as useful as  the developers themselves, so I'm
really glad Ketil posted this here. I for one certainly didn't know
some of this stuff (though admittedly I don't follow development
nearly as closely as I used to.)

Natan's post here ( http://theesylum.com/2008/02/01/desktop-20/ ) was
sort of eye-opening to me; I don't agree with everything he said but I
thought this was uncool:

"[T]here are multiple GNOME Desktop 2.0 apps that are being developed
independent of GNOME. There needs to be a common vision, goal, and
plan.... ***The communication between the different projects is
virtually nonexistent.***" (emphasis mine)

Like I said, I really don't follow development all that much any more;
if it isn't on planet or d-d-l I don't really know about it. So it's
possible that this claim isn't accurate. But if this last sentence
('communication ... is virtually nonexistent') is true, that's a big
problem for GNOME, no? (I did think it was somehow telling that
Natan's blog refers to this as being posted to gnome-love rather than
desktop-devel, which is nominally the center of desktop discussion for
us.)

Natan, I'm curious if you have any ideas on how to encourage
communication between the various projects which are looking at
radical change (besides the obvious one of Writing Code, which you're
obviously trying to do.)

Luis

P.S.  threads all time on d-d-l mentioning ____ before yesterday:

screenlet[s]: 1
AWN: 2
gimmie: 16
online-desktop: 30

This is particularly shocking for screenlets, which AFAICT has had
more screenlets written for it in the past year than the panel has had
applets written for it in nearly a decade. There's a fairly large
community there- and it doesn't seem to touch GNOME much at all.

My inbox, which is where I'm drawing these counts from, suggests that
there have been 110 threads on d-d-l in the past year, so take these
with a grain of salt.