Editor’s Note: Though not mentioned in the body of this
mail, Medusa maintainer Rebecca Schulman announced her plans for
ongoing work with GNOME as well, saying she plans to continue to
work with the GNOME Project as a volunteer, continuing to maintain
and improve the package.
From: Darin Adler To: gnome-hackers@gnome.org, nautilus-list@lists.eazel.com, gnome-vfs@ximian.com Subject: [Nautilus-list] what's happening to Nautilus, other packages (Eazel) Date: 15 May 2001 16:33:14 -0700
As Bart said in his recent email, Eazel is shutting down.
Some people are probably wondering what’s up with packages
maintained by former Eazel employees. Here is the status for a few
of them:
Nautilus — I’ll continue to be the maintainer
of Nautilus for the foreseeable future. I have time to devote to
GNOME for now and I plan to continue to work to enhance Nautilus.
Short term directions for Nautilus will include performance
improvements and a fix to the session manager problem that plagues
many 1.0.3 users. Longer term plans include porting to the GNOME 2
platform. We’ll need some new blood — new volunteers to get
involved — to help out the old hands that remain. Andy Hertzfeld
is going to continue to contribute, and Ramiro Estrugo probably
will too (Ramiro’s out of town right now). John Sullivan may be
working on Nautilus too, but he’s about to take a long vacation, so
he’ll be out for a while. Some of the other familiar faces from
Eazel might show up too, but these are the guys who specifically
told me they’d continue to contribute.
gnome-vfs — Ian McKellar is going to take over
as gnome-vfs maintainer. The good news is that gnome-vfs is already
working as part of the GNOME 2 platform. Short term priorities for
gnome-vfs include filling out the documentation for programmers and
finishing a new API for handling authentication (done by Mike
Fleming). I’d also like to see a Samba module and an ssh module to
fill out the kinds of file systems that gnome-vfs works with, but
we don’t have any volunteers for that yet.
eel — The library formerly known as
libnautilus-extensions will be maintained by Ramiro Estrugo and me.
The main thing planned here is conversion to GNOME 2. In the long
run, we’d like to see most of this library move into real platform
libraries, so this library becomes obsolete.
librsvg — Ramiro and I will also maintain this
library for now. Switching this over to GNOME 2 is the top
priority. The overlap between this library and libart is something
someone might want to tackle in the GNOME 2.0 time frame.
ammonite — The main purpose of this library is
to support Eazel Services. The maintainer, Mike Fleming , may want
to keep it going, but I think it’s more likely that he’ll retire it
soon.
trilobite — The main purpose of this library
is to support Eazel Services. The maintainer, Eskil Heyn Olsen may
want to keep it going. There’s some good package management stuff
in here, including the Nautilus package view, but I think it’s more
likely that he’ ll retire it soon.
Some other stuff:
mailing lists — I’d like to move some mailing
lists from eazel.com to gnome.org at some point. We might want to
shut down some of the lists, but we definitely want to keep
nautilus-list, at least. You can see the list of lists at <<a
href=”http://lists.eazel.com/mailman/listinfo/”>http://lists.eazel.com/mailman/listinfo/>.
bugzilla — I’d like to eventually move all the
bugs from bugzilla.eazel.com to bugzilla.gnome.org. If we use an
algorithm that maps bug numbers in a consistent way (perhaps with
some constant offset), then we can replace the Eazel bugzilla with
a forwarding system so that old links to bugs could continue to
work. If someone wants to work with me on this, please contact me
by email. (It’s OK if we lose the “time estimate”, “inclination”,
and “target milestone” fields in this transition.)
IRC channel #nautilus — I haven’t been around
the last few days, but I promise I’ll be back hanging around there
a bit more. Maybe we can even get Andy to start using IRC!
tinderbox — Having a Tinderbox for Nautilus
and the packages it uses has been really great during the
development of Nautilus 0.1 through 1.0.3. One of the best parts
for Nautilus testing was the availability of “hourly” builds in
both source form and RPM packages. Ian was even working on making
“hourly” builds in Debian package format too. Robin Slomkowski is
willing to work with other GNOME hackers to get one set up. He
knows a lot about making both the Tinderbox server itself and the
build machines work smoothly. You might want to send him mail if
you are willing to work with him.
If you have other questions, feel free to send them to one of
the relevant mailing lists.
I’ll be around.
— Darin