Havoc Pennington: X desktop group

Date: 25 Apr 2000 23:22:36 -0400
From: Havoc Pennington hp@redhat.com
To: editors@linuxtoday.com
Subject: X desktop group

Hi,

At the start of the month I quietly launched a small project
called the X Desktop Group; you can read about its goals here:

http://www.freedesktop.org/about/mission.html

In a nutshell, freedesktop.org is a shared forum and CVS server
where developers from different X-desktop-related software projects
can work together on documentation or code of interest to the X
desktop community as a whole. This could include interoperability
standards, libraries below the GUI toolkit layer, X enhancements,
or whatever people want to work on. It looks like the first item on
the agenda is to finalize and bless the window manager
specification that’s been in the works for a while.

Note that this is a work project, not a diplomacy project or a
post-wildly-speculative-proposals-to-the-mailing-list project.
Please, if you aren’t going to contribute expertise, code, docs, or
HTML, don’t clutter up the mailing lists. I’d like to preserve good
signal-to-noise ratio. Of course if you _are_ going to contribute,
please do!

There’s been slow but steady progress on desktop
interoperability and shared technology over the last half-year or
so; XDG is more an attempt to formalize this existing progress than
it is a new project. www.freedesktop.org is a place where we can
store the results of our efforts, and a central resource for
developers who wish to write interoperable applications.

Things look promising so far; many of the “people that matter”
are getting involved in this effort, including GNOME/KDE core
maintainers, and the LSB. Ideally, we can build a bit of a
cross-desktop developer community. Because the people that need to
be involved are already very busy with their own technology
implementations, I don’t expect extremely rapid results, but I do
expect steady progress.

Don’t hesitate to contact me with questions or comments.

Havoc

hp@redhat.com
(919) 547 0012 x386