GNOME 2.20 released

[Posted September 19, 2007 by corbet]

From:		Frederic Crozat <fcrozat-AT-mandriva.com>
To:		"devel-announce-list-AT-gnome.org" <devel-announce-list-AT-gnome.org>, gnome-announce-list-AT-gnome.org
Subject:		Celebrating the release of GNOME 2.20!
Date:		Wed, 19 Sep 2007 20:26:10 +0200
Message-ID:		<1190226370.21380.8.camel@trinidad.mandrakesoft.com>

                  ======================================
                  Celebrating the release of GNOME 2.20!
                  ======================================

Today, the GNOME Project celebrates the release of GNOME 2.20, the
latest version of the popular, multi-platform Free desktop
environment.

Released on schedule, to the day, it is the culmination of six months
effort by GNOME contributors around the world: hackers, documentors,
usability and accessibility specialists, translators, maintainers,
sysadmins, companies, artists, users and testers. Due to their hard
work, we have another great release to be proud of - thanks very much
to every contributor!

You'll find information about GNOME 2.20 in our release notes, linked
from the 2.20 start page.

          About GNOME 2.20: http://www.gnome.org/start/2.20/

Meanwhile, GNOME developers around the world are looking forward to working
on fresh new features for the next version of GNOME, due in March, 2008.

Enjoy!

- The GNOME Release Team

-- 
devel-announce-list mailing list
devel-announce-list@gnome.org
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/devel-announce-list

GNOME 2.20 released

Posted Sep 19, 2007 20:46 UTC (Wed) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link] (6 responses)

I must say, those release notes are the best release notes I have ever seen. I hope the finished product is just as good.

GNOME 2.20 released

Posted Sep 20, 2007 12:54 UTC (Thu) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (5 responses)

yeah, those release notes are amazing... I've got a lot of work to do to ensure the KDE 4 release notes are that good ;-)

I do have the advantage of more than 2 years of development of new stuff in there, of course, while this is 6 months of work.

And I'm still a bit unsure if I should follow Microsoft and Apple in marketing stuff that happens to be new FOR KDE as an amazing new development (eg MS telling everyone silverlight "finally allows for interactive content and movies on webpages!!!"). I mean, the first thing in this announcement is how Evolution happens to be so smart to see you want to send an attachment, and warns you if you don't attach anything. Now that's a deja-vu, as at least Kmail had that for like 5 years (and that goes for most email clients). So I wouldn't advertise how "it took us 5 years to catch up". But then again, the Gnome release notes would be pretty empty if they would only compare to KDE, let alone if we add MS and Apple in the mix - against those, even KDE doesn't have much new stuff.

meh.

GNOME 2.20 released

Posted Sep 21, 2007 7:13 UTC (Fri) by kelvin (guest, #6694) [Link] (4 responses)

superstoned wrote:
> I'm gonna write the KDE 4.0 release notes. In my uninformed
> opinion, KDE is sooooo far ahead of GNOME. Anything that GNOME
> does, KDE did many years ago. KDE r0xx0rz. I ignore everything
> that is wrong with KDE. KDE is perfect, and KDE4 will be more
> perfect.

Did you have anything *relevant*, or even mildly interesting to say? No? You just had to spew your anti-GNOME pro-KDE propaganda all over this GNOME story. Again.

sigh.

GNOME 2.20 released

Posted Sep 21, 2007 9:15 UTC (Fri) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (2 responses)

Depends on what you consider interesting. I guess for you there is no dilemma in 'what to write about' - for me there is. The Gnome announcement is really good, separating users from developers etc, at KDE we always have a hard time doing that. It's often too much about the technology (we're good at that) and not enough about the end user stuff (Gnome's better at).

And I don't know if I should write how great it is we introduced desktop search through strigi - Vista and Mac OS X have had that since a long time, and Gnome is almost there too. So should I focus on Nepomuk, which is much more unique? Does advertising features which can only be described as 'catching up' harm a project? Gnome, Apple and MS seem to think not - but personally, I don't like it. I dislike Apple when they introduce 'spaces' like they invented it, and the same goes for the others when they introduce stuff they should've had years ago.

GNOME 2.20 released

Posted Sep 21, 2007 23:56 UTC (Fri) by newren (subscriber, #5160) [Link] (1 responses)

Just my $0.02... (disclaimer: I have never written release notes for anything but small projects, so my $0.02 may be inflated...)

You seem to be assuming that potential switchers are the major focus of release notes with these sentiments. That seems a bit odd to me; a much more useful document for potential switchers would be one that touts any advantages of your system relative to others--including ones that have been there for several years. Making the release notes focus just on new features of your system that other products don't have would shortchange both your current users (who want to know all the new features of your new product relative to your older ones), and potential switchers (who may not learn about advantages in your product that you've had for a long time).

My personal opinion is that release notes should focus primarily on existing users of your product; let them know what advantages they'll gain by upgrading. Naturally, spend a bit of extra time on any of those features that will be unique to your product (the extra attention on certain features will help the document also have some use to potential switchers), but don't short-change new features you have simply because someone else also has them.

Again, that's just my $0.02.

GNOME 2.20 released

Posted Sep 24, 2007 10:57 UTC (Mon) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

Hmmm, yes, you have a good point there. Still, there is so much new in KDE 4, the existing and new users both will see mostly new things... Yet I'll take this into consideration ;-)

Thanx.

GNOME 2.20 released

Posted Sep 21, 2007 17:55 UTC (Fri) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link]

FWIW, I didn't take superstoned's comment that way at all. It's an mildly interesting topic - what's the audience for release notes? Is it current users, or potential new users that you're trying to convert from some other system? Which one? One possible audience is reviewers -- you want to make sure they see all the new stuff. His example about the attachement thing is valid - I was kind of surprised to see this as a new feature.

And, again FWIW, I'm not a KDE fanboy. After many years of fvwm*, some blackbox, and several releases of GNOME, I now use XFCE. I installed KDE once (probably v2), tried it for a few days, and decided I didn't care for the tweaker aesthetic. YMMV.

GNOME 2.20 released

Posted Sep 19, 2007 21:11 UTC (Wed) by allesfresser (guest, #216) [Link] (3 responses)

Does anyone know if there's now an option somewhere for switching the file selector so that it doesn't show the folders first? In GTK 2.10 this was hard-coded in gtkfilechooserdefault.c, with a comment stating that folders are *always* sorted first. Personally, I find this behavior to be repugnant (the sorting behavior, not the comment, although it *was* a little extra-snarky as I read it), and would like the items to be sorted in the order I specify (name, last-modified, etc.), no matter whether they're folders or not. (Yes, this is how OS X behaves, and I think it's much more convenient.)

Anyway, even if it is the default, why couldn't there be a checkbox somewhere to switch it for those that want it switched? It isn't that much code after all--I was able to snip out the offending section in a few minutes once I found it, and now my system sorts properly. But making a (gconf?) preference for it, and the associated UI, is beyond my experience.

The importance of good defaults and flexibility

Posted Sep 19, 2007 22:33 UTC (Wed) by riddochc (guest, #43) [Link] (2 responses)

Ahem. <gnome>Options? Why on earth would you want more than one way to do something?</gnome>

Remember that usability study that Sun did for Gnome back in 2001? They found, quite reasonably, that users often spend a long time digging through Preferences dialogs, and that the options were not well explained, organized, or even very well thought out... and the defaults were often not good.

Based on what happened over the following years, I can only assume that either the usability study wasn't read by most of the developers, or read too quickly, or maybe just misunderstood outright, but Gnome seems to have decided that All Options Are Bad.

I think they completely missed the point. I think the major point of the study is the importance of good defaults. And yes, it's good to consider whether an option is even useful in the first place, but software that doesn't take the importance of flexibility into account is one-size-fits-none. And especially so when there's legitimate disagreement over, say, whether folders should be sorted before files or everything should be sorted together. (I prefer the latter, as you seem to.) This is not only inflexible, but I believe a bad default.

But kudos for being on schedule - that's a feat, considering how much software and how many developers had to be coordinated for it. Congratulations on a new release, and I wish Gnome luck in the future. And clue.

The study in question.

The importance of good defaults and flexibility

Posted Sep 19, 2007 22:56 UTC (Wed) by allesfresser (guest, #216) [Link] (1 responses)

Note that Nautilus has a preference for this. It's just the GTK file selector that doesn't. Would it be extremely difficult to make GTK work with that existing preference?

The importance of good defaults and flexibility

Posted Sep 20, 2007 8:20 UTC (Thu) by alexl (subscriber, #19068) [Link]

Technically it might be a bit tricky, since its a gconf setting, and Gtk+ doesn't (atm) depend on gconf.

My favorite feature ...

Posted Sep 19, 2007 22:40 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

... is support for fill-out forms in evince. That's the main reason I've had to use acroread up to now (well, that and a number of other bugs in evince, but it's improving all the time).

GNOME 2.20 released

Posted Sep 20, 2007 9:55 UTC (Thu) by dberkholz (guest, #23346) [Link]

Finally, the Magic Space Bar! Too bad I dropped Evo years ago for other clients with that functionality...