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Picking Up Shotwell Development

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: "elementary-dev-community@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <elementary-dev-community@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> From : Daniel Foré <daniel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

: Daniel Foré <daniel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2014 12:13:33 -0800

Hey Team, I’ve been talking to Jim Nelson (President of Yorba) about Shotwell for a while now and here’s the quick and dirty: Shotwell needs a new maintainer. Ubuntu has the Gallery app, Fedora has GNOME photos, and Yorba just doesn’t have the resources anymore to maintain Shotwell. Their focus is on Geary. So that pretty much leaves us or an unknown to take up the mantel. Jim seems really excited about the idea of Shotwell becoming a part of our community. He thinks we have the talent and the vision to bring it up to date and make it into a really great app. But there’s a small caveat: Yorba recently joined the GNOME development community. So officially, development is done in GNOME git and bugzilla and their wiki, etc. Which is obviously not ideal for us. Enter the solution: After some discussion with Jim, we think the best course of action is for elementary to fork Shotwell. I’ve taken the liberty of setting up a launchpad page for Pantheon Photos<https://launchpad.net/pantheon-photos>. It is currently maintained by elementary-apps team, but I think we’ll want to create a Pantheon Photos team as Jim wants to stay in the loop on development, but we don’t want to spam him with all the other elementary apps stuff. Firstly, I know that this is a big responsibility to take on. I think as a community, we can do it. Having Photos in launchpad and under the umbrella of the elementary apps team will allow us a lot more freedom for casual involvement with the code base. Not to mention, Jim has already stated that he is available to answer anyone’s questions or give guidance regarding how Shotwell’s code is structured, things to watch out for, etc. I think this is going to be a really positive move for our photos app and I’m looking forward to working with all of you on building a really great Photos experience in elementary OS. -- Best Regards, Daniel Foré elementaryos.org

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