So GNOME 2.0 has been stabilising for 6 months, when is it going to be released? While a seemingly innocent question it managed to start a long email thread. The central issue is between those who want to release 'when it is ready' and those who want to release 'early and often'. In the back of everyones minds is the reputation GNOME got from the 1.0 release which was very unstable. The consensus seems to be that it will be delayed again, but not too much. What's for sure is that the initial release will have lots of benefits, but some drawbacks as well and there will be aspects that are regressions from the 1.4.X series.
http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/schedule/
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2002-April/msg00251.html
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2002-April/msg00291.html
The variety of options and buttons to twiddle in GNOME has always been amazing. There's a conflict between what hackers want to use, and the users they are coding for who just want it to work. Much of the GNOME 2.0 HIG work focuses on removing extraneous options and trying to make GNOME feel more like an integrated environment. Anne Marie Dirks kicked off an interesting thread on where the future may lie. One of the charges against Free Software recently is that it cannot produce good UI, I'm not sure if that is true but as this thread shows a lot of effort is put into doing the best job possible.
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-April/msg00524.html
We have gotten to a point in the GNOME 2 beta cycles where most of the developer community is using it as their day to day desktop. It has become very stable and many apps are starting to become availale in GNOME 2.0 versions. So to let you get a closer look on the status of GNOME 2.0 here are some screenshots.
http://fredda.2good.nu/images/Clean-Ice-latest.png
http://www.gnome.org/~gman/GNOME2-apps.png
http://gnome.or.kr/gallery/view_photo.php?full=1&set_albumName=screenshots&id=aaa
http://joshuaeichorn.com/screenshots/gnome2/gnome2_my_desktop.jpg
http://hlp.sourceforge.net/GNOME2/GNOME2-MS-fonts-Nautilus-Customisation.png
GNOME 2.0 will definitely be out faster if everyone helps fix bugs. Bug killing can make you famous as Luis Villas list of issues cleared from Beta 3 to Beta 4 shows. So if you'd like to win friends and influence people bug fixing is the place to be. Luis regularly emails through lists of bugs that are showstoppers for the release, most are hard to fix. However, he's also put together a list of far easier bugs to fix where everyone can join in and cut their teeth on bug-hunting. If you're looking for a place to get help then the gnome-love list of gnome-bugsquad are a good start, and there's also a list of useful resources.
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2002-April/msg00298.html
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2002-April/msg00302.html
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers-readonly/2002-April/msg00304.html
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2002-April/msg00212.html
Ximian Setup Tools are a great way to do some basic administration tasks on a Unix machine. As a bonus to the user they enable one set of tools to be used across a variety of distributions. While the long term aim of the team has been to get them into core GNOME it has always created some conflict. For distributiors their unique admin panels are a differentiator so having a single system is less attractive. Chema Celoria emailed where he things XST is going.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2001-December/msg00020.html
http://lists.ximian.com/archives/public/setup-tool-hackers/2002-April/000695.html
A new patch was released to the glade-devel list porting it to Microsoft Windows. It still needs approval but this patch could do a lot to help this poor, under developed legacy platform get some of the modern software that's part of GNOME. I certainly hope more people using Windows could be lucky enough to use GNOME full time.
http://lists.ximian.com/archives/public/glade-devel/2002-April/000807.html
Martin Sevior reported to the Abiword-dev lists that he's got Abiword working in Evolution. He also sent along a nice screenshot to prove the point. This is a neat example of the component model and the Bonobo system. So shortly we should all be able to read word processing documents straight in email - what will they come up with next, HTML email!
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/02/May/0044.html
http://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/~msevior/abiword/evolution-abi2.png
JP Schnapper-Casteras kindly pointed out to us that our item on the Second Unix Accessibility Conference was slightly wrong. The conference was actually called the Second Linux Accessibility Conference. Apologies if we caused any confusion.
Woo-Kyoung Noh tells us that the GTP Korean team has started translating the GNOME Summary. The number of translations just gets better every week! We now have French, Spanish, Hungarian and Korean - all the links below.
http://www.gynov.org/news/index.php4
http://es.gnome.org/actualidad/
http://cactus.rulez.org/projects/gnome/summary/
http://developer.gnome.or.kr/news/
Thanks for Paul Warren for these lists.
Most active modules:
|
Most active hackers:
|
Currently open: 7003 (In the last week: New: 786, Resolved: 1026, Difference: -240)
Modules with the most open bugs (excluding enhancement requests):
| Module | Open Bugs | New/Opened in last week | Resolved in last week | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| nautilus: | 1031 | 50 | 93 | -43 |
| gtk+: | 494 | 45 | 38 | +7 |
| gnome-core: | 292 | 94 | 64 | +30 |
| gnome-vfs: | 256 | 6 | 6 | 0 |
| gnome-applets: | 242 | 23 | 30 | -7 |
| galeon: | 212 | 129 | 100 | +29 |
| control-center: | 206 | 32 | 25 | +7 |
| GIMP: | 193 | 8 | 6 | +2 |
| sawfish: | 152 | 10 | 59 | -49 |
| medusa: | 126 | 1 | 0 | +1 |
| gnome-panel: | 118 | 66 | 25 | +41 |
| balsa: | 114 | 18 | 148 | -130 |
| gnome-utils: | 109 | 11 | 22 | -11 |
| gnome-pilot: | 103 | 12 | 39 | -27 |
| dia: | 86 | 7 | 6 | +1 |
Gnome Bugzilla users who resolved or closed the most bugs:
| Bug Hunter | Bugs Resolved/Closed |
|---|---|
| pawsa@theochem.kth.se: | 148 |
| Uraeus@linuxrising.org: | 121 |
| yaneti@declera.com: | 95 |
| jsh@pixelslut.com: | 56 |
| heath@pointedstick.net: | 54 |
| kmaraas@gnome.org: | 39 |
| louie@ximian.com: | 38 |
| michael@technologyreview.org: | 33 |
| charles@rebelbase.com: | 29 |
| bordoley@msu.edu: | 28 |
| jody@gnome.org: | 23 |
| maclas@gmx.de: | 22 |
| jpr@ximian.com: | 22 |
| andersca@gnu.org: | 22 |
| glynn.foster@sun.com: | 19 |
Not so much news this week but a general background noise of heavy activity. The community continues to grow, Tim Ney tells us that GUADEC actually had 400 hackers not 300. Many of our readers will not be interested in the long thread on bug 76293 that took place this week. But with all this hacking from so many people taking place it won't be long until we'll all be using the results!
Steve George
gnome-summary@gnome.org