Re: Quo vadis, GNOME? (was: Getting Bugzilla support into Bug-buddy)

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

>>>>> "Matthias" == Matthias Warkus <mawarkus t-online de> writes:

    > Looking at the CVS logs, no one seems to be really working on
    > the core anymore. Pretty much all of the code commits go into
    > Nautilus, Gnumeric, Evolution and Eazel's and Ximian's
    > supporting and surrounding technology and tools.

I think there is a great deal of development going in non-sponsored
projects by either Eazel, Red Hat or Ximian.  To cite your example: we
only barely support Gnumeric (and I do love that application).  If
Gnumeric is getting contributions is because it has a community on its
own that is interested in maintaining the project.

A lot of work is going into shifting towards the GNOME 2.0 platform,
which is why there is a slowdown into hacking the "core" of the
system.  Most of the work is going towards making the 2.0 platform a
great platform.

Now, lets talk about core technology:

	* GNOME VFS: This is a technology that pre-dates Eazel and
          Ximian.  If anything Eazel put resources into the project to
          bring it to a point where it was full fledged, robust,
          stable and productized.  Something that I am sure the whole
          community appreciates.

	* Bonobo/OAF: The component system that is being used by large
          applications like Evolution, Gnumeric and Nautilus.  But
          various components are being developed using Bonobo to
          provide a better development platform and a more reusable
          one: HTML rendering (gtkhtml, mozilla), HTML editing
          (gtkhtml), Web browsing (mozilla, e-browser), Plotting
          (guppi3), image rendering (eog), PDF viewing (xpdf), Vector
          rendering (sodipodi).

	* GConf: a genuinely interesting soloution to the
          configuration problem and with propagation of changes to a
          central data base.  GNOME 1.4 will be the first time when
          this platform is rolled out.  Although I would like to see a
          tigther Bonobo integration, the current Bonobo depedency on
          Gtk+ makes this not a suitable solution.

	* Gnome Print: we are integrating the Omni drivers and
          providing a hook to Gimp Print in the upcoming version of
          Gnome Print.

	  Sadly, it seems like only marginal pieces of Gnome Print
	  will be reused when the Open 2D API that Open Office will be
	  using comes out.  So it is natural for a slow down to happen
	  here. 

Yes, Eazel and Ximian are very focused towards developing large and
user friendly applications that require a large set of resources.

I can not speak for every other contributor, but I can see the
following projects being sponsored by companies that are vastly
improving the GNOME foundations:

	Eazel:
		GNOME VFS
		Nautilus
		OAF.

	Red Hat:
		Gtk+ 2.0.
		ORBit 2.

	Ximian:
		Perl Gtk/Perl Bonobo
		Bonobo.
		Evolution.
		GNOME Print
		Ximian Setup Tools.

If Eazel and Ximian are working on specific parts of the project is
because we are both trying to deliver pretty ambitious applications to
free software users.  And these applications require a large ammount
of work on the foundations.

    > It looks to me as if GNOME is being dismantled by various
    > companies in the process of making GNOME generate revenue. None
    > of them really intend to destroy GNOME, but the final effect
    > will be the same. Today already, the official GNOME packages are
    > considered inferior to Ximian's distribution (Ximian GNOME of
    > the forked artwork). GNOME will lose its identity as a community
    > project if this goes on.

We submit all of our patches (with one exception that I think should
be submited) to the maintainer of the packages as soon as possible.
The artwork is just artwork.

The focus of Ximian GNOME is to bring GNOME to many users that might
not have the expertise to compile/install/configure the latest and
greatest pieces of GNOME.  We have seen a rise of GNOME users since
Ximian GNOME started shipping, as before this happened, it was hard
for many users to deploy a GNOME setup, and they would just use
whatever their distribution shipped.  

Our efforts are now targeted to support more platforms (we had to
spend a number of weeks reworking our internal build procedure to
address these needs) and we hope to have HP-UX and IRIX support in the
near future (and a native Solaris packaging release as well).

All of these efforts are not trying to supercede any GNOME work.  If
anything, everytime we add a patch that is not in the main tree, it
increases our work, so it is in our best interest to get those patches
flushed out to the official GNOME distribution. 

Now, if we brand the binary distribution of GNOME we produce is only
to get the credit associated with this constant task and service that
we are providing. 

    > Consider this an uninformed opinion if you want. In case it is
    > indeed just that, it is an uninformed opinion that many other
    > people probably share.

I think you raise important questions, and important points and we
need to work together to address these problems.  

When someone has the nerve to speak up like you did, it might mean
that we have to reconsider what we are doing.  Maybe we are not
communicating well enough with the community, or maybe we are stepping
on the communities toes.  Either way, a solution must be found.

Best wishes,
Miguel.