next level of freedesktop.org

[Daniel Stone]

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 at 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 at add.ress
e.g:
dstone		Daniel Stone	dstone at 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 at 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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