Planning for GNOME 3.0

From: Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org>

To: devel-announce-list gnome org, desktop-devel-list gnome org

Subject: Planning for GNOME 3.0

Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 13:17:10 +0200

During the first few months of 2008, a few Release Team members discussed here and there about the state of GNOME. This was nothing official, and it could actually have been considered as some friends talking together about things they deeply care about. There were thoughts that GNOME could stay with the 2.x branch for a very long time given our solid development methods, but that it was not the future that our community wants to see happening. Because of lack of excitement. Because of lack of vision. Slowly, a plan started to emerge. It evolved, changed, was trimmed a bit, made more solid. We started discussing with a few more people, got more feedback. And then, at GUADEC, the Release Team proposed an initial plan to the community that would lead the project to GNOME 3.0. Quite some time passed; actually, too much time passed because too many people were busy with other things. But it's never too late to do the right thing, so let's really be serious about GNOME 3.0 now! Let's first diverge a bit and discuss the general impression that GNOME is lacking a vision. If you look closely at our community, it'd be wrong to say that people are lacking a vision; but the project as a whole does indeed have this issue. What we are missing is people blessing one specific vision and making it official, giving goals to the community so we can all work together in the same direction. In the pre-2.x days, the community accepted as a whole one specific vision, and such an explicit blessing wasn't needed. But during the 2.x cycle, with our six months schedules, it appeared that everything (community, development process, etc.) was just working very well, and as the vision got more and more fulfilled, the long-term plans became less important as we focused on polishing our desktop. But we've now reached a point where our next steps should be moving to another level, and those next steps require important decisions. This is part of what the Release Team should do. Please note that Release Team members don't have to be the ones who have the vision; we "just" have to be the voice of the community. (As a sidenote, the roadmap process [1] that we tried to re-establish two years ago was a first attempt to fix this. Unfortunately, it turned out that we were missing the most important side of things: a project-wide roadmap. This is because a collection of individual roadmaps isn't enough to create a project-wide roadmap.) So let's go to the core topic and discuss what the GNOME 3.0 effort should be. We propose the following list of areas to focus our efforts on: - Revamp our User Experience - Streamlining of the Platform - Promotion of GNOME There are also other potential areas that are worth exploring if there is enough interest from the community.