You should go read this, just in case your day hasn’t had enough Brecht, Marx, Knuth, Locke, Deleuze, Stroustrop (as Dr. Frankenstein), Kant, and Stallman. Also, you should read it because you’ve never before read a play where Emacs and The GPL have speaking parts.
Still a little jetlagged, didn’t fall asleep until 6am.
I slept in my own bed last night, yay.
Whipped up a quick page to document various tools for GNOME Power Users. If you know of such things, add them- the page has already pointed me at BrightSide, which I’d never heard of before. In 2.12, we’re going to remove the ‘open terminal’ option from nautilus, so we’re going to have to have this list organized, fleshed out, and publicizable by then. (I wouldn’t object to it becoming collected into ‘gnome-powertools’ and installable as one package, either, though I’m not sure if that is the right thing overall or not.)
I have a ton of mail to catch up on, so if I’m not responding to you, you’re in very good company.
During my talk on Saturday (which I’ve now added to tieguy.org/talks/ under ‘why everyone needs a bugmaster’ (I really need to combine the three bugzilla talks on that page into one big bugzilla best-practices manual)), I mentioned that the kernel adopting debbugs would make the baby jesus cry. This evening, I tried to use the query interface, and again, the baby jesus did in fact cry. I think, though, it made me finally grok (possibly) what the bugzilla query interface needs to be- clearly, being able to generate crazy reports (see next paragraph) is probably not an ‘often by many’ task, so in some ways debbugs (despite the lack of power) may be closer to what most of us really need there than bugzilla is.
So, anyway, I was playing around this evening with bugzilla stats, and looking at them across several major public bugzillas. Some numbers from the past year:
| Project | Bugs Opened | Total Bugs Resolved | %age | comments |
| Debian | ~60500 | unknown | Can’t query for the right data, got the total count by guessing bug #s and checking dates. | |
| Mozilla | 49947 | 29876 | 59.8 | |
| Gentoo | 41289 | 34014 | 82.3 | I’ll slag them less after this. |
| GNOME | 40578 | 31648 | 78.0 | |
| Red Hat | 25927 | 17335 | 66.8 | Resolutions are funky and underdocumented, so the ‘resolved’ # may be funky. |
| KDE | 24223 | 14663 | 60.5 | |
| Ubuntu | 10094 | 7741 | 76.7 | Covers only 10 months, does not include Malone. |
| Mandrake | 6033 | 3954 | 65.5 | |
| Kernel | 1948 | 944 | 48.4 |
All stats are for all components, so comparisons are not necessarily apples and oranges, even between distros. NEEDINFO was not counted as a resolution for these purposes in those bugzillas where it exists. Did not count ‘enhancements’, and I’m currently paying by the byte for download, so maybe I should try again later, or if someone wants to recalc with enhancement requests excluded, that would be awesome.
Some lame observations:
Had a really spectacular day just reading and writing in the Sydney Botanical Gardens, for something like 5-6 hours. I think I could really live in this city, especially if there was some reasonable possibility to live within an easy walk or train ride of the Gardens.
Opera House from just short of Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair, sadly in the afternoon well after the best light.
Was nice not to touch a computer for so many hours, and frankly, not to talk to anyone else. :) I am still on computer and people overload from LCA, and tomorrow and the day after will be quite long. Sleep in my own bed in something like 96 hours, though… yay.
Have finally bought my tickets to GUADEC. Yay. Sadly, after some consideration, I’ve decided not to go to guadec-es- I’m just feeling really beat up right now, have still basically 4-5 more days before I sleep in my own bed, and within a couple weeks I’m on the road again to meet my mother and grandmother for mother’s day. And then the weekend after that would have been GUADEC-es. So… next year, te juro.
Penguin Day appears to be a sort of mental installfest for non-profits, where they are introduced to open source and how it might work for them. Looks pretty cool. Someone should drop them a note and ship them a crate of Ubuntu CDs. :) (And seriously, if there is a GNOME person in the New York area who can spend a Saturday, they should sign up and go- sounds like it would be interesting.)
LCA, overall, was pretty damn cool. My talk went off well (slides up soon), but was overshadowed by Eben just rocking in the previous session. It is very hard to watch him talk and not think ‘I must find a law school in Sydney on Monday and begin taking classes immediately.’
I’m sleeping tonight on Robert Collins’ (of Bazaar fame) couch. Yay. :) [Later: and a damn fine couch to sleep on it was.]
The phrase ‘enterprise software’ gives me hives right now, basically. This thought on enterprise software (the comment, not the original post), which talks about enterprise software being almost more a state of mind than a technical quality, is the first thing I’ve seen that gives me some of the tools to express my unease. I’ll probably rant more later.
Andrew Morton, at his keynote this morning, suggested that the kernel badly needs to use bugzilla more. I clapped loudly (and I think some thought rudely. Oh well, that certainly wasn’t the intent.) He said something about bugzilla that I’d never heard before, and I think maybe that’s been years since that happened. Bonus, I think he was right :) Basically, lkml is a many-to-many attack on bugs; bugzilla narrowcasts and hence is essentially point-to-point (or at least vastly narrows, if you use lists.) That’s a big change for lkml, and (from their POV) a big bug, and they need to fix it. I’m probably going to lose sleep thinking about the implications and potential solutions. (I think Seth Nickell has hinted in this direction before, but if so, he’s never presented the statement to me in a way that made it clear and made the issue so obvious to me. Sorry, Seth. :)
My talk is nearly done. I’m not nearly as satisified as I was with my ‘why everyone should use bugzilla’ talk and paper from OLS a few years ago, but I won’t be embarassed to give it in the morning, despite following Eben. We’ll see, I guess…
The OLS Desktopcon CFP is closing soon; it should be an interesting experiment. Please submit papers if you have some time to spare that time of year.
Elijah: 2.x has a lot of legs left in it; lots of people are happy with it, but ‘m sure people will be using it (and even hacking on it) for ages. I could even see a future where GNOME is doing both major 2.x and 3.x releases in parallel. But you said: ” Yet none of the comments seem to say that ‘here is something that we need in the desktop and that we can’t do in 2.x’”. In fact, I listed four such things. I believe strongly there are some things fairly fundamentally broken or limited about our current user model- menus suck, file browsing sucks, save and open dialogs suck, thinking about applications instead of documents or people or whatever sucks, etc., etc. I want to break all those old models. I want to throw them away. I want GNOME to be doing those things, and leading in them if at all possible. We can do that based on, say, gtk 2.x, and gnome-vfs 2.x, and whatever 2.x underneath, but we can’t call the resulting UI 2.anything- it would be (ideally) fundamentally different, and it would probably not be releasable in six month increments for some time.
It is worth noting that I agree with you that many things that have been discussed as 3.0 are not 3.0 features but 2.x bugs, and it’s possible that there are less radical solutions to some of the things I’ve discussed that are potentially 2.x material. I’ve tried to scythe such things out of the l.g.o 3.0 page with my sword of organizational justice, but obviously some of these issues are also judgment calls.
Dave: I don’t really think that the six month thing is particularly related to the 3.0 problem I was identifying. It is constraining, sure, and will almost definitely be a problem when we are ready for 3.0. But removing the six-month cycle won’t generate code, innovation and energy, which is really the problem. Once those things are there, I’ll be the first one to say we need to kill the regular cycle for a while.
Couple LCA notes:
This is just a very well run conference, it seems, particularly for speakers. We’re treated well and tonight’s dinner was no exception.
The marketing BOF was a success, from my point of view, at any rate. There was very little structure- just a review of some key points, shutting up the Usual Suspects (including myself), and getting new faces to throw out some ideas which people can act on. I’ll upload notes to live.gnome.org tomorrow. In general, we need to figure out how to encourage high-signal communication from new faces without increasing noise or stomping too much on more experienced people. That works in the Real World, like LCA, because the barrier to entry is high. How we make that happen in the e-world, I’m not sure.
Before marketing, we talked a bit about three point zero. I’m more and more convinced that we’re not going to get to 3.0 as an organization- we’re too afraid to fail (for reasonable reasons), we have too few resources, we are too enamored with planning,etc., etc.- I’m now fairly convinced that 3.0 is most likely to happen when someone goes out, experiments, probably fails, but get people interested in their experiment (and maybe their failure) and gets momentum about finishing the experiment and turning it into reality. That experimentation will light a fire under GNOME’s ass and encourage new blood as well.
It seems to me like there are a few top-level 3.0-leaning notions that could be explored by people in their spare time, basement-lab style:
All of these areas have overlap, and all can happen to a certain extent within the 2.x framework. My gut sense is that 3.0 will happen when someone takes 2.x, beats one of these things onto 2.x, and says ‘here is what I have done, here is how to build/play with it, I think this will be 3.0′. Note that this is not when someone talks about doing it- we can’t really test, play, and argue until there is code, nor will the casually interested really get involved until there is something they can build and fight with. (Possibly 4.x is when we get two or three of the four…)
I’d love for UI people to be designing this, and hacker teams to be tackling implementation in an organized fashion. That’s the Best Way. But that’s not happening; the only large coherent teams that exist are reasonably focused on more conservative, short-term needs. I’m becoming convinced that it is someone in a virtual garage somewhere that will actually make us act on 3.0 instead of continuing to discuss it endlessly- we may not adopt their exact solution, but it’ll kick us (or someone more active who supercedes us) into action.
This looks and smells a lot like I’m begging for a fork. That’s probably right, at least short-term. GNOME is too large and too conservative for radical change right now. Looking at it from a more positive perspective, GNOME and associated projects have put together a lot of the pieces for such change to happen- hacky but implemented versions of Storage could probably happen relatively quickly on top of Beagle (and be a discussion point) or collaboration stuff could take place on top of gossip+gnome office, for example. Someone having a vision and going and JFDIing (instead of talking about it on planet or desktop-devel or whatever) will take those pieces and go, I think, and that will be awesome.
[FWIW, the language discussion already looks a lot like this- formally, GNOME is still dithering and not acting, but the grounds for argument are being set by those writing the code, and some would argue (not unreasonably) that tomboy, beagle, muine, etc. have not just set the ground but have already won the battle.]
I’m settling in at LCA; Australia has been totally awesome and LCA appears to be continuing that plan. Miniconf has been fun so far, despite my entirely boring talk.
Off the Great Ocean Road outside of Melbourne.
Beauuuutiful.
Almost ran over a kangaroo on the way home from dinner. Met Pia last weekend, finally. Against all odds, I think Jeff finally did something right. :) All in all, really enjoying our trip. More when I have a reliable (read: non-satellite) connection…