Minutes of the special GNOME-2.0 Board meeting

[Daniel Veillard <Daniel Veillard imag fr>]

[ Please keep the debate on gnome-hackers gnome org, thanks ... ]

	  Minutes of the special GNOME-2.0 Board meeting
	  ==============================================
			13 February 2001
			================


Presents:
=========

    Havoc Pennington (chairing)
    Raph Levien             
    Owen Taylor             
    John Heard              
    Daniel Veillard  (minutes)
    Dan Mueth               
    Bart Decrem

Missing:
========

    Maciej Stachowiak       

Regrets:
========

    Jim Gettys
    Federico
    Miguel de Icaza

 
Decisions:
==========

  - None, this meeting was not a decision making process, hence no
    decision, no action items, an not really an agenda.
  - The people present at the meeting freely discussed the GNOME-2.0
    Of interest is the point that most of us agreed without initial
    discussion on the main goals and target of what should be GNOME-2.0
  - The next step will be to get an ongoing discussion in gnome-hackers


Discussion:
===========

 - Gnome-1.4 Platform
    - list of platforms
    - primary contact per platform
      would be great to have Company/Emails

 - GNOME 2.0
    - Miguel though missing sent a pointer to his notes on the subject
      http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/gnome-2.0
    - Bart:
      + be sure to have a date and the roadmap: 2.0 should be in 2001
        ISV/companies/ distributor need them
      + Balance between need for coordinations vs. this is an open process
      + end of guadec have things planned
    - Dan:
      + aggressive schedule
      + more user visible changes (multimedia, sound, gnome office)
      + consistence in the application
    - Daniel:
      + new release in 2001
      + lot of new core libraries, we need to work on planning this maybe
        before GUADEC
    - Havoc:
      + release early is important for users
      + process improvement, bugzilla
      + need user visible changes, may not have much time to improve gnome-lib
        some of the API breakage may have to be rolled-back
      + we need to focuse on the core of the desktop, this will lower
        the release pressure
    - John:
      + process
        - need an API strategy, including API freeze
      + schedule
	- need Gnome 2 in 2001
      + features
        - need accessibility, early work should be public soon
	- Gtk2 is needed
	- Bonobo in some official stabilized version
	- libxml2
	- documentation, localization need to be cleaned
	- Java integration
      + gnome-office
        - will be the user visible point
    - Owen:
      + agree with rapid timeframe
      + Gnome 1 had the problem of hacking on the stable branch
        we need to freeze the API
      + Moving to Gtk2 may be the main change, reusing the new libraries
        from 1.4
      + we won't have much time on application
      + but we need a nice desktop, documentation, cleanless, the user
        enviroment and session management must be slick
      + keep goals manageable and do it in time
    - Raph:
      + concern is Bonobo, question is bonobo componentization and having
        an API freeze quick is needed to have this one of the goal of 2.0.
	Bonobo is on a critical path
      + otherwise agrees with other.


   => it seems that most of the people agree on this very high level
      point of view.
  
   Process wise we started dicussing what could be done:
     - mozilla bug tracking
     - set milestones add them to the tracking system
     - how do we make decision on API freeze
     - The Board won't mandate but should suggest, and take the initiative
       to make proposal.
     - gnome-libs is too big and would gain being broken down
     - modularity is really important, keep packages of an human manageable
       size
     - having a review process for APIs in the future

   We will initiate discussion on gnome-hacker real soon,

Daniel

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