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Ask questions to the candidates running for the GNOME Foundation elections

Submitted by vuntz on Mon, 2003-11-03 16:43. Gnome Foundation
Gnome Foundation

We want the GNOME community to be involved in the GNOME Foundation, and one way to involve you is to allow you to ask questions to the candidates running for the GNOME Foundation elections. Here's your chance to know what the candidates think about what is concerning you.

Please ask one question per post (and no more). Telsa will select the 10 best questions and we'll send them to the candidates.You may want to look at last year's questions.

Update: Note that you'll still be able to directly ask questions to the candidates by posting on foundation-list.Being on the board of the GNOME Foundation is not a technical job, so please try to avoid posting questions about developement and other hacking type stuff. The GNOME Foundation charter might also be of some interest.

Re: Ask questions to the candidates running for the GNOME Founda

Submitted by pflipp on Tue, 2003-11-04 19:23.

OK now let's be very fair to ourselves for a moment now.

Nautilus was started by Eazel to be a sort of unique pluggable graphical shell project. Coming to think of it, there is a really simple basis required for this. Create a file manager, create a plugin system for previews and pre-sounds, and you're done; all you have to do is wait for some good plugins to pop up. Plugin frameworks aren't really new.

The project, however, burned a lot of resources (money, development and cpu time), partly because the base infrastructure (libraries) wasn't at the level it is now, and partly because the most ambitious parts were developed as quick prototypes. (Eazel's cash funding program was based on delivering quick eyecandy.)

When Eazel made its crash landing, Nautilus did as well. Inside as well as outside turned out not to be all that well overthought as had always been assumed. Again, Eazel's fast-delivery spirit contributed to the quick-fix state of the internal layout, while their urge to merge the Web browser component caused most of Nautilus' outside to be what it was. Nowadays nobody really knows what to do with Nautilus' web component, or with the Web view UI paradigm (vs. OO), and I've the impression that even less people know how to make changes to Nautilus without breaking it.

So just to make a long story short (and you may take this as my question, btw):

Up until now, Nautilus has been developed in a GNOME 1.x style, i.e. "ad-hoc"; there has never been a consistent ideal situation, only "what do we have, and where can we go from here". (Same goes BTW for other standard UI elements, such as the panel and the menu. This stinks because this is what makes GNOME.)

How would you feel about, for once and for all, sketching the ideal GNOME Core User Experience on paper, where you would design the interaction between the user and the core (i.e. no apps) part of the GNOME system? Such a document could compliment the current HIG. Its content may not be realizable in the very near future, but it should be the ideal world, and maybe include a separate realization plan with small, logical increments.

Or, put very diffently (pick yours, I'm easy today ;-):

What would you do in the future to prevent the current lack of direction in the developments of the core GNOME components, especially Nautilus, internally (API) as well as externally (UI)?

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