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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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[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

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