Re: next level of freedesktop.org

[Mark McLoughlin <mark skynet ie>]

Howdy,
	Sounds like a plan Stan .. :-)

	The point made about separating the specifications work from the
implementation work is a good one. Maybe just a separate list for
discussing specifications would suffice, though.

On Thu, 2003-07-17 at 03:36, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'd like to see what people think about making some changes to
> freedesktop.org to create a stronger "center of gravity" for
> X/Linux/UNIX desktop development shared between the desktop projects,
> toolkits, and applications such as Mozilla and OpenOffice.org.
> 
> Concretely, I'm proposing the following steps:
> 
> 1. We welcome desktop-related development projects on an
>    indiscriminate basis; if it's desktop-related and open source, you
>    can use freedesktop.org hosting.

	I'm not sure about "indiscriminate" ... I don't think freedesktop.org
should host a whole bunch of dead-end projects. Maybe there should be
some sort of a consensus on list that "this looks promising" before
hosting it ... hard to make decisions like that, though.

> 2. We move freedesktop.org to better hosting facilities.
> 
> 3. We investigate the idea of making a versioned "desktop platform
>    release" that would be a distribution with multiple modules, much
>    like a GNOME or KDE release. It would contain a snapshot of stable
>    tarballs for various desktop platform components.

	I'm not sure whether "defining a platform" would work too well in
practice. You're always going to have bits some people don't want and
not have other bits that some people do want.

	But having a bunch of projects on a common release train cycle might
work well ...


	So, yeah it sounds like a sensible, natural progression. I don't think
you'll have any trouble finding people to help out ... but have you
investigated funding yet ?

Cheers,
Mark.