Passing the GARNOME Torch



Hi everyone,

Over the years, the GARNOME project has grown in size from a nice happy
project to build GNOME into a mammoth project that comprises both the GNOME 
Desktop and Developer Platform, as well as a number of high-quality 
third-party applications including Abiword, Gimp, Inkscape, 
Firestarter, Rhythmbox and much, much more.

GARNOME also prides itself on maintaining continuing release parity with
the GNOME project.

Maintaining this project is a massive undertaking -- in 2003, Jeff Waugh
handed the project to me and I subsequently split the project into both
'Stable' and 'Unstable' releases, which allowed both 'Power Users' and
'Developers' to either run the latest version of GNOME on their desktop,
or the bleeding edge version, all without affecting their core desktop
installation.

As GNOME gets bigger, GARNOME requires more time to maintain -- after
all, unlike a standard distribution -- GARNOME aims to be installable on
Linux, BSD, OSX, Solaris and more, on any semi-recent distribution,
without failing on old compilers, bad kernel include files or anything
else that individual distributions employ entire teams of people to
manage for them.

As some of you may be aware, it has become apparent that I have issues
far removed from free software and open source that need to be dealt
with over the next few months [1], which means that I can no longer
devote the large stretches of time to preparing, testing, fixing and
releasing the GARNOME project that I have previously been able to.

Over the time I have been this projects maintainer, I have had
assistance from some very talented people via IRC and the mailing lists.
Who have seen just about everything, from the 36 hour, non-stop testing
phases I go through between Unstable RC's and Stable point.zeros, the
'why don't you include XYZ' discussions', even the 'why can't I build
XYZ on Slackware/SuSE/OSX/' building discussions with end-users.

It has been my privilege to work with these three people during my time
as maintainer -- I could not have wished for a better bunch of people to
help me build and support a project which is used and enjoyed by so many
people worldwide.

So, with this in mind -- I have decided to step back from the GARNOME
project's maintenance and pass the collective torch to these fine
'co-maintainers', who I am sure will carry on the pride of this project
to a whole new level.

It is important to point out that nothing about the GARNOME project is
changing [2] -- there will still be rigorous testing procedures before
each stable release, the same dedication to detail, conformity and
compliance as well as the same timed-with-each-GNOME release schedule
as there has always been.

There will also be the same support via this mailing list, as well as by
IRC (on GIMPNet, irc://irc.gnome.org) from all of us.

I hope you, the users of the GARNOME project will welcome Bob, Karsten
and Joseph as the new maintainers of the project as warmly as you
welcomed me. 

Regards,

Paul

Footnotes:

[1]
http://cipherfunk.org/diary/archives/monthly/2005-10.html#e2005-10-25T14_49_05.htm

[2] well, one thing -- but i'll let the new maintainer team announce
that -- it's special :)

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