I'm happy to go to Brussels again this year: it's been a long time since I didn't eat some really good waffles! Of course, I had to pretend I would do something useful there, so I'm participating in two talks, both in the distributions devroom:

• Working with GNOME upstream: this will really be an interactive session, where upstream and downstream people for GNOME can meet, and discuss what can be improved to make the life of both upstream contributors and downstream contributors. It will probably be a good opportunity to also clarify how GNOME 3 might affect distributors, and to get a first overview of how it will be handled downstream. I hope it will be useful for everybody. I certainly hope we'll have a bunch of upstream people attending, and that we'll have representatives for various distributions there (make sure to tell the GNOME people in your distribution to come!).

• Translations of package descriptions: as you can see, I don't have my name attached to this session, so I can pretend I didn't know about it ;-) But I'm supposed to help Anne there as we've discussed this a bit in the past few months. Translating package descriptions has obvious benefits for the end users, but it's a huge amount of work. And therefore we can seriously wonder if it's really worth duplicating this effort in each distribution (hint: probably not). So this session aims to look at what we can do to work together on this, and what it implies.

I'm also eager to have some insightful discussions with the great people that will come to FOSDEM. The hallway meetings have always been productive there!

GNOME

GNOME will have some strong presence again this year. There's the GNOME devroom on Saturday, that will become CrossDesktop devroom on Sunday, and during the whole week-end, we'll have a booth. If you want to help, that's definitely the place where you should go: we need volunteers to run the booth (see Lionel's mail for more details).

The booth should look great again, thanks to the event box, lovely stickers (they'll be free again!) and, hopefully, t-shirts (we're unsure they'll be ready in time, but let's be optimistic ;-)). On Saturday, you'll also find there some information about what is becoming a tradition: the GNOME Beer Event that will occur on Saturday evening.

Oh, apparently, I was volunteered to organize the GNOME group photo on Saturday, at 15:30. So make sure to be around the devroom at that time!

openSUSE

There will also be a good number of openSUSE people, with the usual booth (looking for some openSUSE DVD or sticker? You'll find them there!). This year, there's no openSUSE devroom because there's one big distributions devroom instead; I believe it's a good thing, though: it should help get more collaboration happen, and it's also a nice opportunity to steal good ideas ;-)

I'm happy that most of the boosters team will also attend; I heard it's a great group of people to hang out with!

The GNOME release team held a meeting 10 days ago. Yep, it's hardly believable for many people, I guess: you've always thought the release team members are lazy contributors who just pretend they're doing something useful. So, the truth is that this is also a valid statement ;-) But from time to time, we're having meetings (and doing other things that are not completely useless). Even though we have quite some meeting experience now, we're still optimistic about having enough time to discuss every topics. It turns out we managed to discuss everything in only three hours this time. Quite amazing, if you ask me!

One important topic was of course when to release GNOME 3.0. We've said since quite some time that we would decide in November whether GNOME 3.0 would be released in March 2010 or in September 2010. And in November we managed to decide: GNOME 3.0 is planned for September 2010. We started having a good vision of where we are standing thanks to informal feedback, but we've also gathered direct feedback. Interestingly, this request for feedback was interpreted in some news as a clue for a September release date (hrm, don't ask me if I can read the last link ;-)), while it really was just a request for feedback. There are already some articles about the release date announcement.

The other big topic of the release team meeting was of course the new modules that were proposed for inclusion. The decisions were also announced yesterday. Some details of the decisions are, I would think, quite instructive:

• Clutter is currently blocked because of the copyright assignment required by Intel, which is a situation we'd like to avoid. We've approached Intel about this, but this is not something that can be solved in only a few days. This will hopefully get fixed in the future. This lead us to wonder, though: copyright assignment to a company is something we prefer to avoid, but would copyright assignment to the GNOME Foundation or another non-profit organization be okay for our community?

• dconf isn't approved for 2.30, but is pre-approved for 3.0. This shows our commitment to this new technology, but this also illustrates that we can learn at least a bit from our experience :-) We've had some issues integrating technologies a bit too early in the past, and while doing the same error is sometimes required, this wasn't case here. Still, the community is invited to take an in-depth look at dconf and to start branches that will use it so we can make sure it enters GNOME in the best state possible!

• Tracker, which has been a topic for long threads on our mailing list is approved as an external dependency. We certainly hope this will help fix the chicken-and-egg problem where people don't see the benefit of tracker because nothing is using it. Also, it's worth mentioning that the release team really encourages tracker developers to clearly separate the indexer from the store to avoid confusion that has been plaguing the discussion.

Of course, work on 2.30 has already started and there's even a 2.29.1 release already out. The fact that the decision about new modules is out earlier starting with this cycle should help make sure the new modules and new external dependencies are well integrated through our whole desktop.

Also, since I haven't written anything about GNOME 2.28, I guess it's not too late to celebrate this release. I'll admit it's a bit late, but I'll stay with my "not too late". And I have a good excuse: I was lost in Germany with nearly no internet access at the time of the release. As usual, I'm a big fan of the new GNOME release! I'm just a bit sad I couldn't do more, since I was planning to fix a few things and I couldn't make it...

All the GNOME 2.28 goodness will of course be available in openSUSE 11.2 (as well as Fedora 12, Mandriva 2010.0, Ubuntu 9.10 if you want to try other distributions). We've been doing quite some work in the GNOME team for 11.2, and as usual, it's hard to remember everything we changed ;-) One thing I'm quite happy with, though, is that I believe we're better upstream citizen now — it's still not perfect, of course. Oh, and we have some really great theme, thanks to Jakub, with a nice little touch in the form of the font used for window frames! 11.2 will be out next Thursday.

I'll try to write a bit more about recent openSUSE news on Thursday :-) But work has started again in Factory for the next version of openSUSE. Woohoo!