Miguel de Icaza On GNOME 2.0

Dan93 writes: "Here is an article on what is planned for GNOME 2.0. Pretty interesting stuff such as GNOME VFS, and the cleanup work that is supposed to fix every known architectural problem in GNOME." Also, I heard at LWCE as well from the Eazel folks that by this point in the evolution (ha ha) of GNOME, the nearly-ready-for-prime-time Eazel desktop will be included as well.

Comments

Re:What do you mean what a pity??

[gawi]

IMHO it would be a pity if GNOME decided to "aim low" just because of fear of falling behind the competition. This is open source, where we compete on technical merits, not release schedules or the expectations of share holders.

I think that "aiming low" is a strategy that makes a lot of sense. If I were a GNOME developper, I would prefer having a new version of GNOME containing less changes coming out earlier than something blue six months late. Miguel is proposing a plan that will prevent GNOME to be obsolete at some point. He's also making sure that application will be able to keep up with the changes. He's not pushing the blue sky scenario that much. Think of Blue Sky as the ultimate goal and "Aim Low" as the path.

Many projects depend on GNOME. Miguel is well aware of that and understand that the key to success is to be there at the right time. It is a matter of risk. Not to release something for a long period of time increase the risk. Some projects have choose that path and are doing fine (like Mozilla and KDE) but they had a hard-time. GNOME doesn't need that risk.

A schedule for open-source project... I agree that this is something unusual but for something important like GNOME, we cannot afford to miss that. Or at least, we need to define milestones. You're confusing "necessary delays" and "necessary changes". A good plan would make thoses changes appear gradually and safely. Unplanned delays come from bad planning.

ooh boy, now I'm talking like a project manager...

Re:What do you mean what a pity??

[RPoet]

How about thinking in long terms instead? In the case of KDE, there was a long period without releases. But in return, KDE2 is quite mature, has a stable and extensible architecture and is now improving incrementally because of the "revolutionary" changes made between versions 1 and 2. And although W2k was very belated, it is now the most stable Windows release ever. If anything, I think Miguels examples of delayed projects only goes to show that such delays and revolutionary design changes are sometimes *necessary* in order to lay the foundations for future development.

IMHO it would be a pity if GNOME decided to "aim low" just because of fear of falling behind the competition. This is open source, where we compete on technical merits, not release schedules or the expectations of share holders.
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