GTK+ maintenance

[Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org>]

Hi,

Tim has been doing a fantastic job at creating a list of tasks where
people can help [1]. I really believe this is a good first step to get
more people involved. Having more non-permanent tasks would probably be
great, but well, that's not the goal of this mail :-)

In the past few weeks, I've talked a bit with the Foundation advisory
board members. This is not something that's finished and I'll continue
with this, but this already gave me a rough idea of how things work in
companies wrt GTK+.

Among the AB members, there are basically small and big companies. Small
companies are already quite involved within the community and contribute
as much as possible (since, well, they also need to find some money).

It's (not surpsisingly) a bit easier for big companies to put more
manpower, although there's no hard guarantee for this to happen. And it
might not be easy for people who've not been involved before to
contribute to upstream GTK+. For example, it seems that a lack of
documentation about GTK+ internals doesn't help here (is this something
that could be added to the list of tasks for volunteers?). Of course,
another essential aspect is that experienced GTK+ developers/maintainers
will need to make time to help get joining developers feel at home.

It'd be useful to know how many more people are needed to have things
working more smoothly. Let's talk about full-time people: would 2 people
be enough? Or do we need much more than 2, like 8 full-time developers?
This is the kind of information that will help us convince companies to
put more manpower into GTK+.

Obviously, this not an issue that will get fixed within the next week,
but I do hope that we can start to see more people starting to join in
the next few weeks.

Thanks,

Vincent

[1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2007-April/msg00058.html

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