Edd, so, given that most of what you want exists already, the question is how do we present it in the right way, so that people know about it, and so that it gets even better. A meta-package of some type? That's fairly easy with debian and Fedora I think.

Not only does this stuff exist already, but apart from the IDEs, it's all much better than the Microsoft stuff, and the IDEs are making good progress. In particular, I'm no fan of Microsoft's documentation – it has quantity but very poor quality.

GNOME Platform Bindings 2.7/2.8

Invitations are open for new bindings projects for GNOME 2.7/2.8. Get on the schedule and show you can.

I'm very disappointed that Gtk# won't make it this time either, because they don't want to start targetting GTK+ 2.4 until June, when they will try to stabilize their GTK+ 2.2 API. But then Gtk+ 2.6 will be underway. Being a Beta binding for GNOME 2.6 was meant to help them get in sync for 2.8, but that part of the plan didn't work. Feature+time-based releases are hard, so this is understandable.

I still have hope for gnome-python, particularly as they have recently released their API-stable 2.2 version, to wrap GTK+ 2.2, and they are already looking at GTK+ 2.4.