Final Modules List for the GNOME 2.4 Desktop Release

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

Morning everyone,

Hooray! Here is the final modules list for the GNOME 2.4 Desktop Release!
It was a very tough process, as anyone who watched the d-d-l threads knows,
because all of the modules proposed for inclusion are top-notch, brilliant
pieces of GNOME software. Regardless of their status in the Desktop release,
just about everyone will be using them anyway. :-)

A complete list of the Developer Platform and Desktop modules can be found
under the 2.3 start page: http://www.gnome.org/start/2.3/modules/

We'll update GEP 11 with this list, and additional rationale for included
modules soon.


  In
  --

  Note that all of these apps must continue to meet the standards of quality
  laid out in GEP 10, or they may be removed prior to the final 2.4 release.
  We would not expect that to happen very often, though. :-)

    drwright (now part of control-center)
    epiphany
    gcalctool
    gtksourceview
    gnome-mag
    gnome-speech
    gnomemeeting
    gnopernicus
    gok
    gpdf
    gucharmap
    nautilus-cd-burner
    fontilus (now part of control-center)
    themus (now part of control-center)
	totem (using the gstreamer backend only, for this release)
    zenity

  
  Out
  ---

    battfink
    
      This module was removed from the proposed modules list at the author's
      request. Further work to enrich the energy saving infrastructure will
      be done, so it looks like battfink will be proposed again for 2.6.
    
    galeon

      There was a lot of vocal support for Epiphany on the mailing list, but
      little for Galeon. So, the consensus points to Epiphany. That was due
      to a number of factors: The Epiphany project goals seem to be better
      aligned with GNOME's goals, the Galeon developers do not seem to be
      100% behind GNOME's goals; Epiphany has had regular releases for GNOME
      2.3.x; the Epiphany hackers are working within the project to define
      standards and code for toolbar editing and other functionality, etc.
      While there are a lot of reservations about offending the Galeon
      hackers, and great disappointment that the two projects have not been
      able to cooperate, Epiphany does seem to have the consensus, and make
      the most technical sense. That is not to say that Epiphany is without
      faults, or that Galeon is not excellent software -> we do need to make
      a choice at some stage: Right now there is strong support to add a
      browser to the Desktop release, and strong support for that browser to
      be Epiphany.
    
    gedit-plugins

      Paolo agreed to shift the most useful plugins into gedit, and remove
      gedit-plugins from the proposed modules list. It will live on as a
      separate cool-plugins-for-gedit package.

    gnome-system-tools

      This module was not properly discussed until very late, but when
      developers did give their opinions it seemed that most did not feel
      this module was quite ready for GNOME 2.4. Everyone does think that
      this is essential functionality that we hope will be ready for GNOME
      2.6. The following reasons for this have been mentioned:

        - They are not supported on non-linux platforms, such as FreeBSD.
          This is not a big problem on Solaris, because SUN are not expected
          to use them, but it is unusual.

        - They have not been sufficiently tested. We need to be sure that
          they work and that they work without damaging systems. We need to
          encourage people to test them between now and the start of GNOME
          2.6. For instance, they are already available on Debian Linux so
          we hope to hear about the experiences of those users.

        - There are significant user interface problems. These have been
          acknowledged and the developers already plan to fix them before
          GNOME 2.6.

      To make it easier for these system tools to be included in GNOME 2.6
      maybe they should be proposed individually. For instance, it would be
      easy to accept the Date/Time and Users tools if they were not tied to
      the more complicated Network tool. However, there is no need at the
      moment to split these tools up into separate modules.

      Also, GNOME developers might be more comfortable making decisions
      about the tools if they knew exactly what configuration files are
      changed and/or what command-line tools are called on the various
      platforms. Although users don't want to know about these details, the
      developers probably do. In general, these tool must be thoroughly
      discussed before the 2.6 new-modules decision.

    gswitchit, xklavier

	  Everyone's very keen to include gswitchit, but it seems a bit early to
	  put it into 2.4 given discussions regarding previous generation and
	  cross platform X server support, queries about the user interface such
	  as integration with control centre, functionality goals, etc. We would
	  really like to see this included in 2.6, and hope that Sergey, the
	  control-center maintainers, the GUP and i18n projects can help work
	  out the remaining issues in time.
    
    seahorse

      Whilst there was a lot of support for some of seahorse's features in
      the desktop release, its current state exposes implementation in a way
      that many users will not immediately grasp. There were suggestions
      that it could integrate with an address book system, that it could
      concentrate on the common use cases of encrypting files and checking
      signatures, etc. On the whole, it's great, but the interface is very
      GPG-oriented, and it doesn't deeply integrate into GNOME. Hopefully,
      we'll see it up for proposal again for 2.6.

    sound-juicer

      For the moment, Sound Juicer is somewhat out of place in the Desktop
      release, because there is no real target of integration for it as yet
      (such as music management software, Nautilus, the CD Player, etc). We
      will definitely have to look at it again in the future, as our stable
      of kickarse multimedia applications grows, and desktop integration
      deepens.
    

Thanks to all of the maintainers who proposed modules for this release!

- Jeff

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