Date: 31 Dec 2001 01:18:01 +0200 From: Maxim Sobolev <sobomax@mail.ru> To: gnome@FreeBSD.org Cc: ports@FreeBSD.org, ade@FreeBSD.org, proclus@iname.com Subject: GNOME on BSD: the past and the future Message-ID: <1009754271.254.14.camel@notebook>
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--=-ZXw/OXMx3lEGbszivqW+ Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable [CC'ed to ports@FreeBSD.org for better reach] Dear friends, As usual, the very end of the year is a good time to summarize things that happened during the past year as well as set targets for the next year. The past year was undoubtedly the very successful time for the GNOME development in general of for FreeBSD porting effort. Several "killer apps" and core components either reached their 1.0 release, or are close to that point, and what's more important for us is that most of those apps are now working on FreeBSD quite stably. Of course this would be absolutely impossible without the great help from the FreeBSD GNOME community and I would like to use this opportunity to say "thank you" to all people who contributed patches, bug reports, suggestions and moral support. It was really enjoyable to work with you and I look forward to continuing our fruitful co-operation in the year 2002. Speaking about the future, there are several ideas that I would like to share with you and get your feedback on. First of all, it is quite clear that we need to move away from the existing "one person" development model, because the size of the GNOME ports sub-collection is growing fast, and things are likely to become even worse when the GNOME2 platform will start shaping out in the second half of the 2002. My vision is that we need a team of at least 2-3 dedicated developers with the write access to FreeBSD ports repository by the mid-2002 and 5-6 at the end of the year. I have a few potential candidates on the list and planning to start discussing with each of them shortly. Another thing that I think would be necessary is the dedicated GNOME packages building machine to test and debug the changes on, because current bento turn-around times are sub-optimal. If anybody is interested and has a machine with good connectivity and some spare CPU cycles - please let me know. There are also a number of tasks that are less critical and more long-term, but they are also have to be eventually addressed: 1. Integration of the FreeBSD-specific changes into the main GNOME repository. As the time goes, this becomes more and more important, because with each new release the number of local changes and hacks increases eating up a valuable time due to necessary to merge old changes into the new code. It would be much easier if we have had a person with the direct write access into the GNOME cvs repo (another long-term goal), but there isn't such person yet, so we need to cope with the problem somehow. It would be great is somebody could pick up this task, or at least part of it (say only patches for core components upon which gnomecore depends - see attached list), identify patches that could be integrated and submit them into the GNOME bug tracking system. 2. Creation of the website for the "GNOME on the FreeBSD" FreeBSD subproject. For example we have such website for Java subproject (http://www.FreeBSD.org/java/). I have some ideas about possible content of those pages, so don't hesitate to contact me if you are interested in doing that. On a related note, we need some form of FAQ with answers to a common FreeBSD-specific questions, because I see people keep asking the same ones again and again just wasting their and ours time. I have archives of gnome@FreeBSD.org alias since its beginning as well as my answers to GNOME-related question sent to ports@FreeBSD.org before the alias was created, so what is really necessary here is to do compilation. Again, if somebody feels adventurous enough to pick this up - please let me know.=20 3. Better co-operation with the same porting efforts on others BSD derivatives, most notably NetBSD and GNU/Darwin. Obviously, most of the FreeBSD-specific changes in our tree aren't really FreeBSD-specific, but instead BSD-specific, so that all parties could benefit from that by avoiding duplicate work. From all above, it's most non-obvious task, I still do not have a clear vision of how this could be attacked. 4. Better dialogue with GNOME developers. Since Ade's (who at that time was the member of GNOME Foundation) resignation there was almost no relations between FreeBSD and main GNOME developers. Again, I do not have a clear vision of how to address this problem, perhaps Ade has some better ideas. Ade? Ok folks, that's basically all I have to say on the topic - feel free to follow-up with your comments, suggestions and feedback. Please note, however, that I'll be mostly off-line during the next 2 days, so be more patient - I'll answer eventually. And last, but not least, I would like to wish to all users and developers a happy, prosperous and successful New Year!!! -Maxim --=-ZXw/OXMx3lEGbszivqW+ Content-Type: application/pgp-signature -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (FreeBSD) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQA8L6CeoNu5t4iCBa8RAhvOAJ9aKtJZ223jF6qEACMVobxhzzlBrgCcC+6f Ok89l/WKgM06WlXrPsMB1NA= =4D7k -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --=-ZXw/OXMx3lEGbszivqW+-- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-ports" in the body of the message
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