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.