Hey dobey,
You recently blogged:
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I’ve been working on a specification for configuration infrastructure. Last weeks I’ve been discussing this with some of the key-players in the field of configuration management on the free desktop (including the authors of gconf, kconfig, the config system of openoffice.org and mozilla). I’m convinced that in order to get third party application developers on our side, we need to have a solid and consistent way of dealing with this type of application development obstacles. I will not yet publicise this work because I want it to be perfect first.
I have also been talking about the many problematic design flaws of the X11 clipboard (and I proposed a solution). And recently I mentioned the existence of openusability.org to the GNOME usability team. Both in blogs and on the mailing list. And I blogged about the importance of an infrastructure and/or standard for presence notification. I’ve also prepared the Python bindings for this infrastructure and I’m planning to (if nobody else is going to do it) adjust Gossip in such a way that it registers with Galago.
I also wrote this blog, just to make sure everybody is aware of my targets. I’m planning to put a lot of my free time in the targets you can extract from that document. Knowing I’m probably not going to succeed in any of them. Mainly because of the huge amounts of stop-energy we have in our communities.
These are only the recent actions that I’ve been taking. A few years ago I decided to help the Anjuta team because I was convinced that the GNOME environment lacked a good IDE. And that this was holding back third party developers (Face it. vim and emacs are not always what they want to use. Look at Visual Studio. This is often what they want. Yes really). I’m planning to rejoin them because their work on Anjuta2 is starting to look great. I specifically like the gnome-build stuff (they didn’t create this, the project Scaffold of Jeroen Zwartepoorte caused it to get written. But Anjuta2 is the first project to use it and they are, as far as I know, doing bugfixes for the component).
So what I’m basically trying to say: If you need somebody who is waiting to get in action to work on this type of jobs: I’m here. And I’m willing to put my (free)time on this. Regretfully there’s no leadership or committee steering this. Freedesktop.org already responded that they are not planning to be that leadership. So it’s very very hard. Also note that many of our social differences have made it very hard to talk to team members of the other teams in a constructive way (for me, that’s for example the KDE developers). It’s a very unpleasant obstacle. It’s yet another reason why I don’t yet want to publicise my work on the (protocol) specification for configuration infrastructure (so it’s not “dconf”, it’s a spec that a project like “dconf” would have to implement — Yes, I’m also trying to implement it. So this is not vaporware –). It needs to be perfect in every possible way first. There’s a lot stop-energy. Also in our very own team. It’s very very hard to “just do it”. And in my humble opinion are few people doing it nor are planning to do it.