The GNOME release team have confirmed that GNOME 3.0 will be released in September 2010, with a GNOME 2.30 release in March 2010. The announcement came from Vincet Untz and the GNOME release team and is a result of feeedback from the GNOME development community. Untz assures users that GNOME 2.30 will not be "less stable as usual" saying that the release should actually be more stable as it will integrate the changes that are ready for 2.30, leaving changes that are "still rough on the edges outside of GNOME... until after 2.30 is out".

The change in release date had been allowed for in the GNOME Planning Document. Given the number of radical changes taking place in GNOME 3.0 such as the new GNOME Shell, the GNOME developers gave themselves the flexibility to alter the schedule. The plan allows for GNOME 2.xx releases to happen every six months, to incorporate bug fixes and incremental improvements, with one of the future GNOME 2.xx releases being selected for promotion to GNOME 3.0 status. It was originally hoped, last Summer, that GNOME 2.30, due in March 2010, would be the promoted release. The developer community now believe they would not have completed development, testing and documentation by that March deadline.

Following the announcement, Untz reported on module decisions being made for GNOME 2.30. For example, currently the adoption of the Clutter animation library is stalled because of issues over copyright waivers and copyright assignments and the couch-db modules have been dropped as "too early for wider adoption".

(djwm)