Re: Roadmap for GNOME 2.0

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

 - I like that Federico is going to be in charge of gnome-libs, everyone 
   please be nice when he does mean release-manager things. :-)

 - it should be made clear that after we freeze, the release 
   happens "when it's stable," though a target date is nice
   just so we know when we'd like to release and how 
   much time we are leaving for QA. That is the 1.5 months 
   for QA of gnome-libs is just an estimate.

 - it makes sense to me to _release_ desktop environment and 
   developer toolkit at the same time; the reason is that 
   lots of desktop environment bugs will really be library 
   bugs or may require small API tweaks.

   My proposal is that we feature freeze gnome-libs after 2-3 months,
   and commit to "NO features, and source compatible unless we really,
   really need to break it to fix a bug." 
   
   After gnome-libs is frozen we could release beta tarballs, but I think
   making the actual release before finishing desktop environment will 
   just lead to gnome-libs creep. This time things should really, truly be
   frozen after the release...

 - We should have an initial (maybe 1 month) period of gnome-libs
   development without porting any apps to the new gnome-libs. 
   This is because the new APIs will be in a state of flux, 
   and even the build setup (gnome-config) won't necessarily work,
   so if we don't have this period then the whole CVS tree will 
   break. 
 
   2 weeks may be enough, hard to say.

 - I think 5 months desktop environment devel and 3 months QA is more
   conservative than 6 months devel and 2 months QA. I'd be in favor of
   more conservative.

The release goals look very nice, I'm convinced that we can complete them
on time if we stick to them.

Can I make a final plea not to break things that work? If nothing else, we
are going to have to be running CVS panel and gnome-terminal and so on
over the next months, and if our desktop environment is broken we will not
get much work done.

I don't think Federico's current document has any major breakage planned,
so we just have to stick to it.

Havoc