On Wed, Jul 16, 2003 at 10:36:17PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote: > 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. As long as it's a centre of gravity, too, so we're not discriminating against those who speak the Queen's English. ;) > 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 suppose you have to set limits, though - hosting all of KDE's stuff on fd.o, for instance, would probably be unreasonable. > 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. My hero! > - some shared library for the URI namespace (VFS/ioslave) > - a sound server > - my proposed hardware library (http://ometer.com/hardware.html) > - a configuration system? > - useful bits factored out of OpenOffice.org or Mozilla These parts are all immeasurably useful to integrating the desktops closer together - right now, KDE and GNOME (for example) act completely different wrt this, and it would be cool to get them merged. I'm mainly talking about the VFS/ioslave and sound server works, but configuration system could be useful as well. FYI, I've forwarded this mail to kde-core-devel kde org, to try to get some enthusiasm from that camp going. > - cvs infrastructure to allow maintainers to put ACLs on their cvs > modules > - ssh rather than pserver for cvs access I also suggest Subversion; while it does still have its issues, it's amazingly clearner than CVS, and quite a few people are now becoming used to SVN and not wanting to use CVS. Although I can't take on full administration (as I suggested in an earlier private mail to Havoc), I am certainly willing to provide help in the form of advice, and other material ... usefulness. > - some way to track real names and email addresses for each > cvs account KDE just has a file (accounts, in kde-common), like this: cvsname Real Name email add ress e.g: dstone Daniel Stone dstone kde org > If we can host Keith Packard's work, we have an offer for a server on > a large Internet connection at Portland State University. This is > currently hosting xwin.org. > > We can also host a server at Red Hat's colocation site, along with > gnome.org/vger.kernel.org/sources.redhat.com, but we would need to > find a server to colocate there. The Xwin setup is pretty decent now, and the machine is largely unloaded. > So that's it. I believe these changes would make freedesktop.org more > useful, and remove some of the ways that it bottlenecks on me. > Comments are welcome. Please feel free to post "me too" or send me > private mail, as otherwise it's hard to judge consensus. I believe this is an excellent move, and also eliminates the whole "Havoc's off skiing" bottleneck (sort of like the way kernel activity drops when DaveM goes snowboarding ;), which is also good. Cheers! :) d -- Daniel Stone <daniel fooishbar org> http://www.kde.org - http://www.debian.org - http://www.xwin.org "Configurability is always the best choice when it's pretty simple to implement" -- Havoc Pennington, gnome-list
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