GUADEC

Everyone just returned from the GNOME Users and Developers Conference
in Paris, which was a lot of fun and a great success. Kudos to Mathieu
Lacage and the other conference organizers! I'm still recovering from
the jet lag so bear with me.

The big news from GUADEC is the creation of a "GNOME Steering
Committee," 9 people to coordinate the GNOME 2.0 release, and start
setting up a nonprofit GNOME Foundation. The committee has no formal
authority, it's just a smaller group that can try to keep track of
what's going on and be sure we're moving forward on these two goals.

All decisions will still be discussed on gnome-hackers or
gnome-devel-list as appropriate. That is, the committee will basically
just gather information and maybe come up with proposals, it won't be
actually making decisions.

The committee members were chosen to represent major technical areas,
while also getting a cross-section of nationalities and
GNOME-contributing companies. 

 - Miguel de Icaza              (Bonobo, applications)
 - Kjartaan Maraas              (Translation)
 - Dave Mason                   (Documentation)
 - Havoc Pennington             (gnome-libs)
 - James Henstridge             (libglade, language bindings)
 - Owen Taylor                  (glib, GTK+)
 - John Harper                  (window manager)
 - Maciej Stachowiak            (Nautilus)
 - George Lebl, Jacob Berkman   (gnome-core)

So there are 9 members at a time, George and Jacob decided to
alternate meeting-attendance duties. 


In other news, Miguel and I presented the new development roadmap; 
the steering committee will be fleshing out some of the details and 
monitoring progress:
 
  http://developer.gnome.org/status/roadmap.html


It was exciting to see nearly all the major GNOME contributors in one
room; the sheer number of people was impressive. Helix Code, RHAD
Labs, and Eazel combined were only a small fraction of the hackers at
the conference. GNOME's momentum is impressive.

To see bunches of GUADEC attendees for yourself, Ole has the
comprehensive collection of GUADEC photos on his site:

  http://nerdhaven.uio.no/~ole/GUADEC/photos/


The "coolest presentation" award certainly belongs to Andy Hertzfeld
for his presentation of Nautilus; several Nautilus features drew loud
applause from the audience. Mathieu is collecting all the presentations 
on the GUADEC web site, keep checking there:

  http://www.guadec.enst.fr/

Another flashy demo was Michael Meeks's presentation of Bonobo
controls working with Glade. The Glade GUI builder can now load and
manipulate components, just like Delphi or Microsoft Visual Foobar.  A
pretty big deal; component technology is an important part of rapid
application development, and gives us a reasonable way to ship
3rd-party widgets and small nongraphical libraries. Component
technology is roughly similar to the Perl, Apache, or Linux kernel
module systems; hopefully it will give us the same ability to harness
open source development.


One interesting idea from the conference is a language bindings
mailing list.  Guillaume and James were planning to create a list
where language binding authors could work together on GTK/GNOME
enhancements to ease language bindings, and also work together on
binding tools like the defs file.


Helix hosted a huge party on a boat on the Seine on Saturday night;
the horde of drunken GNOME hackers was one of the more frightening
experiences of my life. Somehow there were no major accidents.


Overall it was quite a good time, and an impressive show of GNOME
community momentum. I finally feel like I've met almost all the major
contributors in person, which is pretty cool.