my blog

Wednesday 6 April 2011

Enjoy GNOME 3 today!

GNOME 3.0

GNOME 3 banner by Jakub Steiner & Lapo Calamandrei

After nine years in the world of GNOME 2, our community is now moving one step further with the availability of the first GNOME 3 release. We're writing an important new line in the history of our project.

It's hard to ignore the feelings this event creates.

I remember the long discussion Lucas and I had about the future of GNOME, in front of his hotel at FOSDEM 2008.
I remember how, at GUADEC 2008 in Istanbul, the release team discussed the idea of finally doing GNOME 3.
I remember the Boston hackfest in October 2008, and all the ideas that were generated there.
I remember writing the first draft of our plan for GNOME 3.0, late at night at the end of March 2009, while being hosted by Christophe.
I remember meeting with as many teams as possible for two days at GUADEC 2010 in the Hague, to decide if we should delay the release.
And I obviously remember the Bangalore Hackfest we did last week to work on the final details on the release.

I love our project and what we achieved. You will love it too!

[22:04] | [GNOME] | [#574] | [10 comments]

Getting ready to celebrate GNOME 3? Maybe in Lyon?

Today, we'll release GNOME 3 to the world.

We still need to finalize a few things here and there, but the release is mostly ready. While every .0 release generates some stress (especially when it's one starting a new major cycle), there has been much confidence about how smooth this would all go. This is mostly thanks to the Bangalore Hackfest, where we were able to prepare for this big step.

I actually came back from India on Monday around noon and I immediately started working on the release. We nearly got all tarballs in time (thanks!), and even though we had to re-roll a few tarballs to fix some extremely visible issues, everything went fine so far. I was able to quickly publish the 3.0.0 modulesets so that anybody could help with smoketesting and I built everything, at least twice. The few visible issues I've seen in my tests are either already fixed in re-rolled tarballs or in git, or with a patch in bugzilla. Since those issues are not necessarily considered as blockers (it depends on how severe they are), some of them might stay for 3.0.0; but they'll certainly be fixed for 3.0.1, due in one month. So all in all, things are good there. There is still some coordination to be done for the website update, though.

The bad news is that my body apparently doesn't want to keep working like this for long: what was supposed to be a short break at 6PM yesterday ended up being the end of the day, as I fell asleep for the whole night. I guess considerably eating on my sleep time in the last two weeks and falling sick during the last days in India didn't help :-)

It's slowly getting hard to keep focusing on just the release in this last day, since I already find myself thinking about all the release celebration! There's much excitement all around, and all the launch parties around the world make me think we'll all have fun for the celebration. I'll go to the Lyon party tomorrow (Thursday), and I certainly hope to meet many people there. So don't hesitate to pass by if you're near Lyon tomorrow!

Now, going back to release mode :-)

[08:41] | [GNOME] | [#573] | [2 comments]

by Vincent