GUADEC: A message from the release team

Instead of the talk he was planning to give on the first day of presentations at GUADEC, GNOME release manager Vincent Untz needed to shift gears to announce the biggest news of the conference: GNOME 3.0 would be delayed. The reason for the delay is simple, the code and documentation "weren't quite ready", so rather than have an "OK-ish" release, the team decided to push it back. There will still be a release in September, however, as the team is committed to the six-month release schedule, but it will be another in the 2.x series: 2.32.

Untz noted that GNOME 3 has a compelling story: "It's the first time since I started with GNOME that people are so excited about GNOME". GNOME 3 was first announced at GUADEC in 2008 with a target of making the 2.30 release (i.e. March 2010) be the first GNOME 3 release. In the interim, that was pushed back to September, and now to March 2011. The team has "quality as [its] first priority" and, after meeting with various teams in the first few days of GUADEC, it became clear that more time would be required for a solid release. "We want people to love GNOME and we want people to love GNOME 3", he said.

In addition to the 2.32 release, there will also be a GNOME 3 beta release in September. "We want people to start using it, start playing with it, application developers to port to GNOME 3". By March, "we want something that's really good", Untz said.

But that means developers and maintainers of GNOME modules will need to work on two branches for the next two months: one for 2.32 and one for 3.0. That dual-branch development mode made up most of the concerns expressed by audience members about the announcement. Some were worried that it would cause too much extra work, but Untz and the release team—who joined him on the stage—seemed to think it was manageable.

The release team will be taking steps to ease the transition, starting with getting GtkApplication backported to GTK+ 2, which will help modules that need to switch back from GTK+ 3. There will also be a flag (--enable-gtkN) available in the configuration process that will allow applications to be built for either GTK+.

Some maintainers will want to deliver new features in September and for those, the 2.32 and 3.0beta releases will be the same. Others may want to focus on 3.0 and will just release an update to 2.30 with bug fixes and the like. Separate from his talk, Untz said in email that each maintainer will decide how to handle it and the release team will assist: "we do not think it will be that much of a burden".

He also noted that GNOME's development model, by design, is focused on "evolution rather than revolution", and that 2.32 would fit that model well:

Certainly GNOME Shell is the most high-profile module that is still in need of work, but there are others as well. There are still a lot of applications that need migrate to GTK+ 3 and GSettings, for example. Updating the documentation for GNOME 3 still has a ways to go, "the new accessibility stack would get performance improvements that will make the switch to the new stack much smoother for users", the GTK+ engine for the art team's new theme is not quite ready, and so on:

There are some other things the release team will be pushing, he said in his talk, including encouraging the maintainers to "target achievable goals". In particular, there will be something like a feature freeze for the GNOME Shell functionality so that they finish what they started and don't go off "making crazy plans". In addition, the release team will be trying to get the community to implement the UI mockups that the design team has created.

There has been some criticism of the GNOME 3 plans because of the lack of support for "applets", but Untz sees it differently. Most of the applets in use today are either things that will be incorporated into GNOME Shell or are some kind of monitoring tool (for system performance or email for example). There are also a few applets that are "dedicated to a specific task", like the Tomboy notes applet or the Hamster time-tracking applet, he said.

There are plans to look at a system to replace applets some time after the GNOME 3 release, but it is not the team's highest priority at the moment. There are alternatives, though:

Overall, the announcement was met with general approval from the audience. The project wants to make a big splash with GNOME 3 and "OK-ish" is not the way to do that. There seems to be a clear focus on the things that need to be completed before there can be a solid release, so one gets the sense that we won't see further delays. For users who can't wait, there are plans to make the beta more easily available for various distributions, which should allow more testing and a better final release.

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