State of the FreeBSD GNOME Project

[Chuck Robey]

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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

2 items affect me, in contributing to ports:

(1) there seems to be no list of ports to do, and no signup list for those
ports.  This is 2 things, the list, and being able to reserve the work.  If it
DOES exist, could someone point me at it?

(2) I have longstanding philosophical problems with the direction of ports,
which (while it stops me from wanting to write any more ports) it wouldn't stop
me from making a set of diffs that would make the building of a port a lot more
painless.  Would this be of help?  I could supply the non-ports part (any diffs
I needed to make) if someone else would care to do the ports Makefile parts.  I
just don't want to actually code up FreeBSD ports again, but I think that both
the KDE and Gnome work you guys do is very impressive.

Understand, I don't want to bend anyone's ear about my disagreements with Ports
(I was able to do that to my complete satisfaction some years ago,  since
everyone was so polite and reasonable, to let me get my opinions across then, I
feel bound never to raise the subject again.)  I just needed to make clear the
reason why I won't make ports anymore, so I could maybe get a chance to help you
folks without violating my own rules.
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