Including Do in GNOME

[David Siegel]

A lot of people at Gran Canaria Desktop Summit are asking about
getting Do into GNOME, and I am having trouble seeing the benefit for
us. Switching to Git/GNOME infrastructure strikes me as a step in the
wrong direction, but people are interested so I thought I would share
this with the list to see if anyone has thoughts.

http://live.gnome.org/ReleasePlanning/ModuleProposing

Here is my understanding of the situation: for the last ten years,
GNOME made all of its own applications. In recent years, independent
application authors emerged from the GNOME community, developing
applications on their own but with the intent of eventually getting
them into GNOME. When I started Do, I just wanted to create a great
free software application that was fun, exciting to hack, and
incredibly useful. Together we have built an incredible project, with
hundreds of thousands of active users, awesome contributors, excellent
development and design practices, distro adoption, and vision. When
people started suggesting GNOME inclusion, I said "GNOME can do
whatever it wants, just like the distros -- if they want to include
Do, go for it." Then I was told that inclusion in GNOME would put
extra work commitments on us, and put extra constraints on details
like where we host our website and wiki, where our source lives, how
we handle bugs and translations, etc. I am all for GNOME inclusion,
but I think our project should operate completely independently of the
GNOME project, not be absorbed by it. As far as I can tell, our
project doesn't need GNOME oversight, endorsement, or infrastructure.
If extra work needs to be done for GNOME inclusion, GNOME contributors
should do that work.

Thoughts?

David

[Jason Smith]

ah GCDS...

Getting GNOME Do into GNOME superficially sounds like a fantastic and
fun idea. I think there is a lot to be gained by being inside of GNOME.
However, like you, I see the baggage this brings along as a little too
much. Moving our bug tracker, source code, release policies, and
website, while sucky, are only secondary blockers to me. The big one to
me is the "extra work commitments", which provide an additional burden I
do not think our dev team can handle in its current condition. We have 5
core members, all of whom have what can be only described as a part-time
commitment to GNOME Do when at any time any of us may be required to
walk away for an extended period of time.

What I am getting at here is I think we do best when we have the freedom
to work when we can on what we can, and not have additional upstream
requirements on our work times. Ultimately, I think being forced to work
on tools not of our choice means we will be slowed down further. For
these poorly stated and quickly typed reasons, I think we should stay
outside of GNOME.

Jason

[Alex Launi]

On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 5:47 PM, Jason Smith <jass...@gmail.com> wrote:

Moving our bug tracker, source code, release policies, and
website, while sucky, are only secondary blockers to me

These are pretty much primary blockers for me, because of your primary blockers, our toolchain makes it easy for us to work when we have time. Bugzilla sucks- basically if we were using bugzilla I would never look at bugs. Same with git, bzr is so nice to use. If I have to fight with the tools to work, I'm probably not going to want to work. So while these are secondary blockers for you, then influence your primary ones quite a bit.

I'm fine with being a "GNOME Project" as long as it means we get to work our way, and GNOME just gets to list as us one of the best applications in their stack and use us for marketing.

--
--Alex Launi

[David Siegel]

Great, looks like we all see eye-to-eye on this issue.

David

Sent from my latest-and-greatest, proprietary, DRM-enabled, crypto-locked gadget.

[Christopher James Halse Rogers]

On Mon, 2009-07-06 at 18:28 +0200, Alex Launi wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 5:47 PM, Jason Smith <jass...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> Moving our bug tracker, source code, release policies, and
> website, while sucky, are only secondary blockers to me
>
> These are pretty much primary blockers for me, because of your primary
> blockers, our toolchain makes it easy for us to work when we have
> time. Bugzilla sucks- basically if we were using bugzilla I would
> never look at bugs. Same with git, bzr is so nice to use. If I have to
> fight with the tools to work, I'm probably not going to want to work.
> So while these are secondary blockers for you, then influence your
> primary ones quite a bit.

Launchpad blows bugzilla away, yes. That would be my primary blocker.
The transition to git wouldn't have to affect us at all - the bzr-git
plugin works well enough that we could simply ignore git entirely.

It'd be nice to be a GNOME project, but only if we get to use Launchpad
and bzr :).

[Alex Launi]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 7:55 AM, Christopher James Halse Rogers <chalse...@gmail.com> wrote:

That would be my primary blocker.
The transition to git wouldn't have to affect us at all - the bzr-git
plugin works well enough that we could simply ignore git entirely.

Not really- it doesn't support push.

--
--Alex Launi

[Christopher James Halse Rogers]

True, but a little misleading; it *does* support dpush, which is
basically the same thing but ends up rebasing your local tree against
the thing you've just pushed.

What it doesn't have at the moment is a reasonable way to deal with
branches in git.

[BostonPeng]

I'm not a programmer, just a user who helps out with docs for Mac4Lin,
but I wanted to add my $.02. I'm glad to see that the GNOME folks love
Do so much, but purely from a user point of view I have to say I'd be
disappointed if GNOME pulled Do under their umbrella. The fact that Do
is a 100% independent (?) project is one of the things I love about
Do. As a former Windows user who has also tried KDE I'd be concerned
that the ease of configuration in Do would be limited, especially
after having to jump through so many hoops to configure other parts of
GNOME (screensaver jumps to mind).

Seeing how much trouble merging Do into GNOME would cause from a tech
angle is just one more reason I hope Do will stay independent. Some
users hate docks, and some prefer other docks) so I feel it would be
best if users can opt-in to use Do rather than having to specifically
opt-out of using it. Otherwise GNOME would remind me a little too much
of Firefox devs who seem to want to practically throw the kitchen sink
into the default browser to make some vocal (and possibly new-ish)
users happy rather than to let users know about the wide range of
addons already available. The result of their "all in" philosophy is
that some long time users now feel Firefox has gotten bloated to the
point of pushing some of us to look at other browser alternatives.

As David said, while GNOME would benefit from including Do, Do doesn't
need GNOME inclusion. Hopefully GNOME devs will voluntarily submit
code to make Do even better, which would be a win-win situation all
around.

[Alex Launi]

On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 3:05 PM, BostonPeng <peng.th...@gmail.com> wrote:

 I'd be concerned that the ease of configuration in Do would be limited, especially
after having to jump through so many hoops to configure other parts of
GNOME (screensaver jumps to mind).

Why? They don't go through and change our source code or anything.. I don't think is a concern that you should have.
 

Seeing how much trouble merging Do into GNOME would cause from a tech
angle is just one more reason I hope Do will stay independent. Some
users hate docks, and some prefer other docks)  so I feel it would be
best if users can opt-in to use Do rather than having to specifically
opt-out of using it.

What applications get shipped by default is a distro decision, not a GNOME decision. I'm not really sure you fully understand what GNOME is. This move will not affect users at all, it's really a decision that only affects developers.
 

Otherwise GNOME would remind me a little too much
of Firefox devs who seem to want to practically throw the kitchen sink
into the default browser to make some vocal (and possibly new-ish)
users happy rather than to let users know about the wide range of
addons already available. The result of their "all in" philosophy is
that some long time users now feel Firefox has gotten bloated to the
point of pushing some of us to look at other browser alternatives.

GNOME is a collection of applications, not a specific app, so this concern is pretty much address by what GNOME is. I think that most of your concerns come from a lack of understanding as to what GNOME is. GNOME is not an application, GNOME is a collection of many applications.

--
-- Alex Launi

[BostonPeng]

You're right, I wasn't aware of what being made a part of GNOME would
entail. I'll withdraw my comments until I can better understand what
it would all mean. Although I did realize that GNOME is a collection
of apps, but I also have memories of apps being brought into a
"collection" that didn't end up completely satisfying the apps'
users.

On Jul 9, 9:18 am, Alex Launi <alex.la...@gmail.com> wrote: