GNOME Bindings

We've done 2 releases now. Everyone is on track.

GNOME New modules

The release team must make the new modules decision soon, so it's your last chance to speak up if you don't think your favourite new modules have had the support that you expect. The release team try to keep reminding ourselves that we have to represent the consensus more than our own opinions, so there should be no surprises.

_I_ think the consensus says that these modules should go in, and _I_ think that's sensible:

  • GNOME System Tools: Time, Users and Network control panels. I think we would be insane not to add these. There might be some menu reorganisation to do, and we'd would have liked the distros/vendors to work together more on this before now. But if we don't get these on the schedule now then I think we'll be in exactly the same position next time, and the time after that. Nobody should expect distros to use these immediately, but distros should expect to use them eventually and improve them so that they can. I think there is general support for this strategy in the community and from the distros.
  • Evolution and evolution-data-server: At first I was apprehensive about choosing one of the many email clients, but I don't mind now that they are providing a generic contacts/calendar API that the other clients can use, and that we will put in the GNOME Platform eventually. There is some concern that the new Evolution version will not be finished in time. If so, then it will have to wait until GNOME 2.8 – only a few schedule months. There's a lot of community support for adding it to the Desktop.

  • gswitchit, libkxklavier, and gnome-keyring are already in, having been swallowed by existing modules. Both of these add functionality that will make lots of people very happy.

I think that monkey-bubble, gdesklets, gmodconfig should not go in because they do not help with any users' goals. Hopefully we will have some GNOME personas soon that make that clearer. gtksu seems to be a library that is not used by anything in the Desktop yet, so it should not go in. The community feedback, though small, seems to support that.

gnome-network seems to be in flux, and a bit of a hacker's set of tools anyway.

I'm still waiting to hear exactly what situations/tasks/goals will be improved by mozilla-bonobo, and I've barely used RhythmBox. I'm a bit confused about how Rhythmbox and Totem fit together. Totem was not proposed, so I guess gstreamer still isn't quite ready yet, though it looks like they are getting there. Luckily, distros can choose to ship the xine version for now.