Miguel de Icaza
posted to the GNOME mailing lists:
Hello hackers, Well, the freeze is about to happen, and some of you might find a void empty in your hearts due to the lack of some code to modify wildly. The freeze right now applies to gnome-libs and gnome-core, other modules will be gradually frozen. There are still various sorts of changes that can be commited to the GNOME CVS in the frozen modules. If you are uncertain about a patch you want to commit, please post your patch first to the gnome-hackers@nuclecu.unam.mx mailing list to get approval. Do not worry, hacking has not finished, there are many things to do in the meantime and we will appreciate a lot your help on these issues: - Balsa, the mail reader needs help. We would be grateful if you could help us finish the mail reader. - ORBit needs to provide a way to not block on message reception (contact sopwith@cuc.edu for work on this area). - Session management: Many gnome applications have Session management, but many do not, or have problems. We would like to ask everyone to try gnome-session and start/stop their sessions and make sure every gnome application that we will ship has a fully working session management setup. - Localization of GNOME. I have created a list to cordinate the efforts of localization. We need volunteers to localize the message catalogs (the .po files in the GNOME distirbution) We need volunteers to localize the .keys file (these are the mime-type specific actions). We need volunteers to localize the .desktop files. To subscribe to the list, send a mail with a subject of "subscribe" to gnome-i18n-request@nuclecu.unam.mx - Nice icons for the file manager. We need 48x48 icons that are suitable for file types in the file manager. A complete list of the icons we need is on the gnome-icons CVS module. Currently the file manager is using some very ugly and old icons I found, and they need to be replaced. We would like to have the icons keep the spirit of the current gnome icons. If you have artistic talent, please let us know and share your icons with us. - API documentation There is a setup for documenting the GNOME api - Bug fixes During the next few days we will encounter many bug reports about GNOME. GNOME needs to be rock solid and has to be as clean as possible. Commiting bug fixes is highly encouraged. - More file manager sugar There are a number of features that we want to add to the file manager, feel free to contact me for them (or look at mc/gnome/gnome.TODO for details). - Improving existing GNOME applications There are a number of other GNOME applications that are not yet frozen, improving them, and writing documentation for them is also another thing you can do. - Consistency. The applications should have a uniform menu system and keybindings should be considered buggy and should be fixed as soon as possible. - Portability problems. If GNOME does not compile on a platform, we are very interested in getting patches to make it work on that platform. I am sure this list is incomplete, please, feel free to comment on it. Thanks a lot to all of the GNOME programmers that have worked so hard during the past 16 months to make GNOME possible. Best wishes, Miguel.