what's happening to Nautilus, other packages (Eazel)

[Darin Adler <darin bentspoon com>]

As Bart said in his recent email, Eazel is shutting down.

Some people are probably wondering what's up with packages maintained by 
former Eazel employees. Here is the status for a few of them:

	Nautilus -- I'll continue to be the maintainer of Nautilus for the 
foreseeable future. I have time to devote to GNOME for now and I plan to 
continue to work to enhance Nautilus. Short term directions for Nautilus 
will include performance improvements and a fix to the session manager 
problem that plagues many 1.0.3 users. Longer term plans include porting 
to the GNOME 2 platform. We'll need some new blood -- new volunteers to 
get involved -- to help out the old hands that remain. Andy Hertzfeld is 
going to continue to contribute, and Ramiro Estrugo probably will too 
(Ramiro's out of town right now). John Sullivan may be working on Nautilus 
too, but he's about to take a long vacation, so he'll be out for a while. 
Some of the other familiar faces from Eazel might show up too, but these 
are the guys who specifically told me they'd continue to contribute.

	gnome-vfs -- Ian McKellar <yakk yakk net> is going to take over as 
gnome-vfs maintainer. The good news is that gnome-vfs is already working 
as part of the GNOME 2 platform. Short term priorities for gnome-vfs 
include filling out the documentation for programmers and finishing a new 
API for handling authentication (done by Mike Fleming). I'd also like to 
see a Samba module and an ssh module to fill out the kinds of file systems 
that gnome-vfs works with, but we don't have any volunteers for that yet.

	eel -- The library formerly known as libnautilus-extensions will be 
maintained by Ramiro Estrugo <ramiro fateware com> and me. The main thing 
planned here is conversion to GNOME 2. In the long run, we'd like to see 
most of this library move into real platform libraries, so this library 
becomes obsolete.

	librsvg -- Ramiro and I will also maintain this library for now. 
Switching this over to GNOME 2 is the top priority. The overlap between 
this library and libart is something someone might want to tackle in the 
GNOME 2.0 time frame.

	ammonite -- The main purpose of this library is to support Eazel 
Services. The maintainer, Mike Fleming <mikef praxis etla net>, may want 
to keep it going, but I think it's more likely that he'll retire it soon.

	trilobite -- The main purpose of this library is to support Eazel 
Services. The maintainer, Eskil Heyn Olsen <eskil olsen sol dk> may want 
to keep it going. There's some good package management stuff in here, 
including the Nautilus package view, but I think it's more likely that he'
ll retire it soon.

Some other stuff:

	mailing lists -- I'd like to move some mailing lists from eazel.com to 
gnome.org at some point. We might want to shut down some of the lists, but 
we definitely want to keep nautilus-list, at least. You can see the list 
of lists at <http://lists.eazel.com/mailman/listinfo/>.

	bugzilla -- I'd like to eventually move all the bugs from 
bugzilla.eazel.com to bugzilla.gnome.org. If we use an algorithm that maps 
bug numbers in a consistent way (perhaps with some constant offset), then 
we can replace the Eazel bugzilla with a forwarding system so that old 
links to bugs could continue to work. If someone wants to work with me on 
this, please contact me by email. (It's OK if we lose the "time estimate", 
"inclination", and "target milestone" fields in this transition.)

	IRC channel #nautilus -- I haven't been around the last few days, but 
I promise I'll be back hanging around there a bit more. Maybe we can even 
get Andy to start using IRC!

	tinderbox -- Having a Tinderbox for Nautilus and the packages it uses 
has been really great during the development of Nautilus 0.1 through 1.0.3.
 One of the best parts for Nautilus testing was the availability of 
"hourly" builds in both source form and RPM packages. Ian was even working 
on making "hourly" builds in Debian package format too. Robin Slomkowski 
<robin slomkowski net> is willing to work with other GNOME hackers to get 
one set up. He knows a lot about making both the Tinderbox server itself 
and the build machines work smoothly. You might want to send him mail if 
you are willing to work with him.

If you have other questions, feel free to send them to one of the relevant 
mailing lists.

I'll be around.

    -- Darin