8 messages in org.freebsd.freebsd-gnomeRe: State of the FreeBSD GNOME Project| From | Sent On | Attachments |
|---|---|---|
| Joe Marcus Clarke | Mar 29, 2009 11:53 am | |
| Chuck Robey | Mar 29, 2009 3:00 pm | |
| matt donovan | Mar 29, 2009 6:16 pm | |
| Joe Marcus Clarke | Mar 29, 2009 6:50 pm | |
| Joseph S. Atkinson | Mar 29, 2009 7:07 pm | |
| matt donovan | Mar 30, 2009 5:02 am | |
| Jeremy Messenger | Mar 30, 2009 3:40 pm | |
| Gary Dunn | Mar 31, 2009 4:50 am |
| Subject: | Re: State of the FreeBSD GNOME Project | |
|---|---|---|
| From: | Gary Dunn (know...@aloha.com) | |
| Date: | Mar 31, 2009 4:50:57 am | |
| List: | org.freebsd.freebsd-gnome | |
On Sun, 2009-03-29 at 14:53 -0400, Joe Marcus Clarke wrote:
As some of you may have already figured out, the news is not good. The number of active team members has dwindled due to various Real Life time constraints. Even my own time is becoming strained due to obligations at work. We find ourselves facing a rise in difficulty when it comes to porting GNOME. Hal is being replaced in part by DeviceKit which is currently very Linux-specific. Hal itself needs some updates. The system tools don't really work on FreeBSD. We could use a NetworkManager port (may happen in this SoC go around).
We're also spread pretty thin when it comes to expertise in the number of ports we maintain. While we require a working Gecko backend, none of us have the desire or drive to maintain the various ports. We desperately need help. We need people to step up, and start working on ports and helping with development branch porting. But more importantly, we need people to take the reins on "hard" projects like those listed above. If GNOME is to survive on FreeBSD, we need new blood.
So here's the short list. What do you want to do?
* Help port GNOME 2.27 and its external dependencies (when GNOME 2.27 development starts)
* Port and maintain DeviceKit and DeviceKit-power
* Fix and maintain sysutils/system-tools-backends
* Add kern.geom.confxml support to hal to fix the no-space-in-volume-label problem
* Assume maintainership of Gecko ports
* Make libxul (aka xulrunner-1.9) work for building ports like epiphany and yelp
Joe
First of all I would love to raise my hand and take on one of these, but I doubt my programming skills are up to the task. I was a good c programmer, but it's been ten years. Back then I ported less and microEmacs and some other stuff to Xenix, and hacked its native mail software to incorporate domain addressing and routing. Heady stuff, but trivial compared to what I see you guys doing today. If I did take on one of these I would need help, which can create more drag on the team. Got anything "easy?"
In the broader picture, it seems to me that the Gnome team should do more to support various platforms. The way it looks to me, and I might be off-base here, is that Gnome designs for Linux and the FreeBSD team does all the porting work, each and every time. I would like to see each new Gnome release build on FreeBSD "out of the box" and the FreeBSD Gnome team function more as advisers.
The same thing should happen with Gecko. I assume that maintainership is a lot more involved than tracking releases and updating the ports tree. Why can't the Mozilla team do the heavy lifting?
-- Gary Dunn, Honolulu os...@aloha.com http://openslate.net/ http://e9erust.blogspot.com/ Sent from Slate001
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