Re: GNOME 2.0 Schedule

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Stephen Browne <stephen browne sun com> writes:
> 
> So we now have a schedule, we have a list of things that have been
> done so far and the status of libs in the 2.0 platform, but do we
> have any idea of what is left to do to make up a deliverable Gnome
> 2.0 user desktop?

My feeling is that a deliverable desktop will be a) stable and b) on
time which means c) punt features left and right. i.e. the work to be
done is: port to the new platform; fix bugs. And that should be all.
We have _no time_ to work with.

The "take advantage of new platform" phase will most likely have to be
called GNOME 2.0.1, 2.0.2, or even 2.2. This can be quite soon after
2.0, for example a month after 2.0 we could make a release with far
more stuff actually using gconf, or whatever. But we need the 2.0 to
be done soon, and be stable. We are losing too much ground due to lack
of a release.

Here is an ad hoc list of core components:

  - panel
  - key panel applets
  - session manager
  - help browser (use Nautilus for now)
  - control panels (can use Nautilus as shell, so 
    we can afford to punt the shell part)
  - Sawfish (will leave unchanged, but we need to write a control 
    panel for it that works with control panel setup)
  - Nautilus 

Every time I make this list, I forget something, so I probably did so
again.

People are itching to massively rework nearly everything in that list
to take advantage of the new platform and just generally be more sane;
I've been hacking on a new session manager myself, for example. But
those efforts are going to have to be post-2.0, I don't see how we can
get them done in the 2.0 timeframe. I mean, my session manager "works"
already, but going from "works" to "usable" takes a lot of effort.

Havoc