Athena User Interface Project seeks advice

[Richard Tibbetts <tibbetts MIT EDU>]

GNOME Developers-

  I am a current MIT Watchmaker (student developer) working to
integrate GNOME into the MIT Athena computing platform. This is a
fairly extensive project, involving porting several Athena-specific
applications as well as modifying some GNOME code to work with the
Athena environment.

  My current project is to construct the development platform on which
we will be building the system. This seems to mean a decision between
the GNOME-1.0 platform and the GNOME-2.0 platform. Most of the work
will be occurring over the summer, before GNOME-2.0 goes to release.
Thus my decision comes down to two questions:

1) What will the changes be between 1.0 and 2.0? If we modify the
   panel, or the file-manager, or other things, how much will we
   lose? If we build apps on 1.0, how much will we need to change
   them to work with 2.0, and how many convenience API's will we be
   missing out on?

2) How unstable will GNOME-2.0 be through the summer? Will maintaining
   a GNOME-2.0 system be unduly painful? Will the API's be changing,
   or will we just be dealing with buggy code?

It seems that the GNOME Roadmap
(http://developer.gnome.org/status/roadmap.html) should have given me
this information, but it really did not. I might suggest that many
application programmers are in my position, and that maintaining the
Roadmap is fairly important. It has not been updated since February.
(I would volunteer to maintain it, but I do not think I am connected
enough to the GNOME project to keep track of everything).

-*- http://www.mit.edu/~tibbetts -*- finger tibbetts@monk.mit.edu -*-