Re: GNOME 2.0 Schedule

[Jamin Philip Gray <jgray writeme com>]

On Wed, 10 Oct 2001, Iain wrote:

> > The good news is that there is no
> > reason in the world we can't release a new version of GNOME (2.0.1 or even
> > 2.2) relatively soon after 2.0.  Shorter release cycles would be good, I
> > think.
> >
>
> Because we'll get users/journos who judge Gnome 2 by the state of the
> Gnome2.0 release. Remember "GNOME is buggy" because of the state of
> gnome 1.0 even though Gnome 1.0.1 was better? We will be judged on the
> state of the gnome 2.0 release, and if Gnome 2.0 doesn't have any reason
> to upgrade or any user visible changes then people will think that gnome
> 2.0.1 will have no user visible changes.

We can make it abundantly clear in our press releases what GNOME 2 is.
Perhaps on the surface one might think that GNOME 2 is just a port to GTK+ 2
with no real advantage, but to me GNOME 1.4 was just a stepping stone to
GNOME 2.  GNOME 2 brings it together: The next generation of our toolkit
(Pango, AA fonts), the component framework, gnome-vfs, accessibility
framework, etc.  Yes, some of these components were in GNOME 1.4, but I
really think GNOME 2 pulls them all together.  Porting applications to GNOME
2 *will* result in a better user experience.  Developers will want to write
applications against the GNOME 2 platform, and more and better applications
means a better user experience.

Incidentally, what user-visible features would you like to see in GNOME 2?
Maybe we could list a bunch of things that we'd love to see in the GNOME
Platform/desktop in the future and assess how long they'd take to implement.

To me, the things that users are concerned about are integration and good
applications.  And the *best* way to provide that sort of platform is to
release often and particularly to release the GNOME 2 platform (which has
many, many library changes) as soon as possible.  The sooner the platform is
released the sooner developers will begin writing components for GNOME 2, and
working towards better integration.

> > Absolutely.  It's often very small things, such as the default look and feel
> > that add so much polish to a release.
>
> Polish is useless if no-one is using it.

Agreed.

----------------------------------------------------
name:    Jamin Philip Gray
email:   jgray writeme com
icq:     1361499
aim:     jamingray47
web:     http://DoLinux.dyn.dhs.org

I don't want to meet your kin,
Make you spin or do you in,
Or select you or dissect you,
Or inspect you or reject you.
All I really want to do
Is, baby, be friends with you.

--Bob Dylan