GNOME Summary, July 25 – August 1

Havoc Pennington sent this to the gnome-announce mailing
list:

This is the GNOME Summary for July 25-August 1. It summarizes
development activity and news.

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Table of Contents
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1. Jim Cape heads usability-tuning initiative
2. GNOME 1.0.50 planned
3. Fix the Window Manager
4. gnome-libs and gnome-utils 1.0.12
5. Realtime CVS tracking
6. Hacking Activity
7. New and Updated Software

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1) Jim Cape heads usability-tuning initiative

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Miguel posted to gnome-list, requesting a volunteer to compile
user comments on GNOME usability and transform them into
suggestions for enhancing the GNOME desktop and applications. Jim
Cape <jcape@jcinteractive.com> signed up, so he’s the
man.

Discussion of this topic should go to gnome-gui-list@gnome.org.
Please, keep it focused on incremental enhancements to the existing
codebase. Radical redesigns of the user experience are only welcome
if accompanied by multiple hackers ready to do the work.

Here’s Miguel’s post:

http://www.gnome.org/mailing-lists/archives/gnome-list/1999-August/0011.shtml

James Cape has a preliminary web site:

http://www.jcinteractive.com/gnome-ui/

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2) GNOME 1.0.50 planned

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We’re about ready to move on to the next major revision of
GNOME; but before doing that, we’d like to be sure the stable 1.0.x
series is 100% the way we’d like it to be. So we’re pushing for
1.0.50 over the next month or so.

Once that’s out, we’ll be moving on to GNOME 1.2 or 2.0 or
whatever we decide to call it. We have lots of cool things ready to
fold in as soon as we fork gnome-libs into stable and unstable
branches. Expect a detailed roadmap soon.

Elliot announced the 1.0.50 plan:

http://www.gnome.org/mailing-lists/archives/gnome-announce-list/1999-July/0046.shtml

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3) Fix the Window Manager

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Dr. Mike posted to say that we probably need a GNOME window
manager that “matches” GNOME and integrates with it extremely well.
Users shouldn’t have to see the word “Window Manager.” This seems
to be a growing consensus; read Dr. Mike’s post here:

http://www.gnome.org/mailing-lists/archives/gnome-list/1999-August/0052.shtml

GNOME will continue to work with all window managers, but we
want to provide a nice default that gives the user a truly seamless
experience. If hackers don’t care about mismatched themes and the
like, they’re free to use any WM that implements the GNOME/KDE WM
spec.

Now all we need is someone willing to hack on this window
manager. It’s perhaps hard to find someone, since the express
purpose of the WM is to blend into GNOME and be user-invisible, so
it’s not a glamorous job. But it would improve GNOME enormously.
There are several people who’ve been working on a GNOME WM of one
kind or another, but no one has emerged with the definitive hunk of
working code.

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4) gnome-libs and gnome-utils 1.0.12

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New releases of these two, see the main GNOME site for
details:

http://www.gnome.org

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5) Realtime CVS tracking

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For those who haven’t seen it, GNOME Bonsai now has a page
listing CVS commits in the last two hours. A fun way to monitor the
GNOME development action:

http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/cvsquery.cgi?module=all&hours=2&date=hours&link=front

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6) Hacking Activity

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Module Score-O-Matic:

User Score-O-Matic:

Elliot dominates everyone by a factor of two – I think he
changed every spec file in CVS or something like that. 🙂 I know
he also did a lot of cleanup and bugfixing.

Gtk– is really under heavy development, and has been for a long
time; Karl Nelson’s libsigc++ is making it a really nice
development framework for C++ applications. Check this out.

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7) New and Updated Software

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• GameStalker
• Gnomba
• Xwhois
• gproc
• GSokoban
• vsa
• GFile
• GNotes!
• Pybliographer
• Pharmacy
• GPeriodic
• gaddr
• Giram
• POP Checker
• libefs
• gcad
• gaspell
• gx10
• BMUD
• Gaim
• Gears
• IglooFTP
• mosquito
• gvsy
• GSnes9x

There were more software releases last week, but a good bit more
CVS commits this week. So go figure.

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Until next week –

Havoc