State of the FreeBSD GNOME Project

[Joe Marcus Clarke]

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
-- 
Joe Marcus Clarke
FreeBSD GNOME Team      ::      gnome at FreeBSD.org
FreeNode / #freebsd-gnome
http://www.FreeBSD.org/gnome
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