Re: What are the community's goals for 2.0? [was Re: Getting serious about releasing]

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

<sent this once but for some reason appears not to have hit the list.
Sorry if this ends up being a double post.>

On Wed, 2002-04-24 at 10:58, Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
> Observations:
> 
>  * Just pushing the deadline out can often be a very bad way of getting
>    a stable release out.
> 
>     - People lose interest

Definite, legitimate fear. Hadess seems to indicate that this is
happening to him. Is this happening to other non-vendor people too? I
guess I'd hoped to get this type of feedback from /developers/- Dick,
Steve, your feedback is appreciated but you're not putting in the hard
hours right now :/ Paolo? KevinV? 

>     - People start hacking on cool post release features instead of 
>       working on the release

I haven't seen this happen yet, but obviously if your last point is a
reality (and I have no sense if it is or not- which is why I'm asking
non-vendor people for feedback) then this will follow shortly.

>     - You get into a eternal cycle of "but we have to fix X" "but we have to fix Y"
>       "but we have to fix Z".

Like I said there is a fairly hard date behind this, I /think/, but I
can't/don't speak for vendors here.

>     - Dependencies start shifting underneath you. ("Oh, but GTK+-2.2 will
>       be out then, we should use that.")

Again, good reason.

>  * There are stability guarantees that have to be made for:
> 
>     - API
>     - File locations
>     - String freezes
> 
>    That block people from doing the final stabiliziation for a vendor
>    release until the upstream has said "this is it."

Should we do all of these hard in the near future, then, well before
2.0? We will be platform ready for 2.0 well before we are quality ready.
As it stands, the libraries are in fairly good shape and maybe ready for
.0, and the apps (sawfish, nautilus, and control-center in particular)
are just embarassingly not .0 quality yet, not by any reasonable
standards.

>    I don't think it's reasonable for Ximian/Sun to say "we will guarantee
>    that GNOME-2.0 is out by July". But once GNOME-2.0 is out, it's
>    much more reasonable to say "we will have a GNOME-2.0 based product
>    we feel comfortable shipping by July."

Like I said, I'm not and can't speak for Ximian/Sun. I'm just putting
out a date that is tied to their release and by which we can guarantee
some code quality.

>  * If people are going to trust being able to build solutions on top of
>    GNOME, we need *two* reputations:
> 
>     - Being able to deliver a quality product
>     - Being able to deliver on schedule.
> 
>    It's easy to think of lots of examples of software products that failed
>    because of getting a bad reputation in one or the other areas.
> 
>    We can't steal from one of these goals to satisfy the other. 
>    So, we have to look elsewhere to figure out how to satisfy these two 
>    goals; and this mostly means reducing the feature set, and waiting
>    on fixing useability/etc. bugs so that we can deliver stability.

<personal hat on again for emphasis>
The list as hacked out by Havoc is not going to have stability. It's
going to have so many little, embarassing bugs that it's overall going
to be very embarassing. Period. There may be no big, nasty things you
can point at, but it's going to feel shaky, unpolished, and
unprofessional. We just /can't/ achieve both of your listed goals, Owen,
no matter how much punting and trimming we do. Sorry but that is how it
breaks right now, I think.
</>

> I'm certainly not arguing that we should release something at the
> GNOME-1.0 level of stability. And I don't think there is any danger
> that we will ...  GNOME-2.0 is already considerably more stable than
> GNOME-1.0 was.

It's more crash-free, yes. I (again personally) think we're past the
point where 'it doesn't crash' should be good enough.

> But we should have only three very simple goals:
> 
>  - Someone sitting down and playing with the desktop shouldn't be able
>    to crash it or discover embarassing misbehavior. (*)

The second part will take anyone about 2-3 minutes of playing with
nautilus or control-center at the moment. First part is substantially
harder, thankfully.

>  - The desktop should be useable as a day-to-day desktop for the 
>    average current GNOME user. (**)
>  - We shouldn't be blocked from moving forward in the future.

This sounds a lot like 'works for me' which is fine, if that is what the
community wants. I'm trying to get that sense from people who haven't
been intimately involved for ages.

> Other goals such as:
> 
>  - No feature regressions from 1.4
>  - No unhandled patches in the bug tracker
>  - 101% key navigable.
>  - etc.
> 
> May be important, but cannot be allowed to block 2.0, because they can
> be fixed after or on top of GNOME-2.0, and the cost of losing momentum
> with eternal release slippage is large.

Don't disagree there.

> (*) And we need to be ruthless in taking the simplest path to fixing
>    such problems. "X crashes" ... "can we remove X?". "Menu item Y does nothing"
>     "remove menu item Y".

That's fine, to a certain extent. At the point we're at now that's going
to leave us with... well, I'll call it a feature-free desktop. We'll
have to remove most of control-center and large chunks of nautilus. Oh,
and we won't have a window manager. I think these are fairly large
regressions :) 

</personal hat>
Luis