State of the FreeBSD GNOME Project

[Gary Dunn]

On Sun, 2009-03-29 at 14:53 -0400, 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

First of all I would love to raise my hand and take on one of these, but
I doubt my programming skills are up to the task. I was a good c
programmer, but it's been ten years. Back then I ported less and
microEmacs and some other stuff to Xenix, and hacked its native mail
software to incorporate domain addressing and routing. Heady stuff, but
trivial compared to what I see you guys doing today. If I did take on
one of these I would need help, which can create more drag on the team.
Got anything "easy?"

In the broader picture, it seems to me that the Gnome team should do
more to support various platforms. The way it looks to me, and I might
be off-base here, is that Gnome designs for Linux and the FreeBSD team
does all the porting work, each and every time. I would like to see each
new Gnome release build on FreeBSD "out of the box" and the FreeBSD
Gnome team function more as advisers. 

The same thing should happen with Gecko. I assume that maintainership is
a lot more involved than tracking releases and updating the ports tree.
Why can't the Mozilla team do the heavy lifting?


-- 
Gary Dunn, Honolulu
osp at aloha.com
http://openslate.net/
http://e9erust.blogspot.com/
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