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Plans Falling in Place for GNOME 3.0; Tackling the Challenges of x.0 Releases

Churning out an x.0 software release must be akin to becoming a new parent -- the event exudes promise, joy, and hope, yet is simultaneously humbling, exhausting, and terror-inducing. While it isn't realistically possible to plan out detailed roadmaps for your children's long-term future, it's crucial to do so for a software project. While whether the presence of a carefully planned roadmap makes progress more or less stressful depends largely on who you ask and at what point you're asking, a project with clearly outlined goals and direction has a much better shot at sustained developer interest and solid releases.

Many projects grapple with this, and as GNOME pushes towards its 3.0 milestone, the GNOME Release Team talks about the voyage to this point -- and how best to travel forward from where it currently stands.

There's something awe-inspiring about software releases that are able to coordinate and incorporate a number of loosely related sub-projects in one complete package. Distributions do this, of course, but desktop environments face these same challenges. Sometimes new versions aren't quite what was hoped for -- but a general upward trend in usability and feature sets should override any single release's success or failure.

The GNOME Release Team is trying to address what some have called a "lack of vision" within the project. They say that vision certainly isn't lacking, it's getting people together to embrace and develop further the different aspects of this vision in an organized manner that complicates moving forward. The Release Team attempted to remedy this a few years ago by re-introducing roadmap and planning procedures, but realize, now, that it's not enough for sub-projects to have a road ahead, the project as a whole needs one.

Again, this is no easy task, but the GNOME Release Team has taken the first step. It's gotten together, and talked about the difficulties in the past, proposes some ways to overcome these issues, and suggests where the focus should center in the GNOME 3.0 release.

GNOME 3.0 is a milestone release, and with its focus on streamlining the platform, bringing it up to date, and making some significant overhauls to the user experience (changes along the lines of Gnome Zeitgeist for easier document access) planning doesn't have to just happen in advance, it needs to be made public and hashed out in advance. It's about getting people on board with suggestions, input, and help.

It seems so simple, and it seems so obvious, but communication, especially in projects with this kind of scope, is monumentally important. It's what turns those unnerving moments in development into a bundle of joy come release day.

• linux
• GNOME
• development
• desktop
• GTK

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