Event details

The road to GNOME 3.0

von Vincent Untz (Novell, GNOME, openSUSE), Johannes Schmid (GNOME Foundation)

Saturday, 12.06.2010, Berlin II, 11:00-12:00 Uhr

The GNOME project was created in 1997, and reached version 1.0 in March 1999. Three years later, in June 2002, GNOME 2.0 was released. After nearly eight years, GNOME 2.30 is out, marking the culmination of years of work on the same branch of GNOME: 2.x enabled the project to progress in a evolutionary way for year, and the cumulated changes are huge.

The GNOME community could probably have kept going the same way for a long time, and still bringing the desktop forward. However, the Release Team proposed an initial plan back in 2008 to focus on a new goal: starting a new branch with GNOME 3.0. After months of discussion, a detailed plan with specific goals was published to help the community focus on the 3.0 effort, and September 2010 was announced as the target date to deliver this new version.

In this talk, we will explain the successes and limitations of GNOME 2.x that lead to the decision to start the new 3.0 effort, and we will study the planning methods that are used to release GNOME 3.0 in a way as painless as possible -- both for distributors and users. With this context in mind, we will look in details at the philosophy standing behind the main changes of GNOME 3.0.

GNOME 3.0 will integrate a huge number of blending edge technologies which include:

GTK+ 3.0: A new version of the GTK+ toolkit that gets rid of lots of deprecated stuff and concentrates on staying on the top of Linux UI toolkits. Clutter is an OpenGL toolkit responsible for desktop effects. Gobject-introspection binds (semi-)automatically the C API to various languages. Mutter/gnome-shell integrates the desktop and the window management with javascript extensions. Dconf/GSettings is a new configuration system for the desktop.

These haven't been been randomly chosen but clearly evaluated to make development of and for GNOME easier and to provide a great user-experience. While GTK+ 3.0 is mainly intended to fix API problems and ease the further development of GTK it also brings new features with the so called "GtkExtendedLayout" as most user-visible one.

GnomeShell, which replaces the gnome-panel is actually part of the new window manager mutter which was based on the successful metacity. This tight integration together with using clutter for rendering windows allows a completely new user-experience.

As GnomeShell is written mostly in JavaScript it brings all the improvements done in the JavaScript engines in the past to the desktop, creating a fast and efficient scripting framework. This includes run-time evaluation and scripting. GObjectIntrospection allows writing of applications with a C core and the other parts written in a scripting language (like JavaScript or Python) without taking care of binding the API. Finally GSettings/dconf replace the old, slow and unmaintained gconf and will allow a better settings managements including faster startup and better notifications.

Über den Autor Vincent Untz:

When he's not procrastinating or eating ice cream, Vincent Untz shows his real face: he is an active Free Software enthusiast, GNOME lover and advocate, and openSUSE booster. Rumours say Vincent started contributing to the Free Software world by triaging bugs for the GNOME Bugsquad, before becoming maintainer of various GNOME modules. However, he finds it's simpler to declare he is a "touche-à-tout", working on various (some say random) areas of the desktop. Vincent Untz is also trying to cure his coding addiction, by holding positions such as GNOME Release Manager and GNOME Foundation director. Vincent is still pushing French as official language for GNOME, and hopes to succeed really soon now.

Über den Autor Johannes Schmid:

Bereits als Schüler war ich an der Entwicklung der Anjuta IDE (http://www.anjuta.org) beteiliegt. Des weiteren beteiligte ich mich an der Entwicklung von GTKmm, dem C++-Binding der GTK+ GUI Bibliothek.

Während meines Studiums arbeitete ich 2 1/2 Jahre für die Openismus Gmbh und arbeitete dort an eingebetteten Linux Lösungen, insbesondere dem Maemo Framework als auch an diversen GNOME-Technologien (GTK+, Glib, etc.).
Seit 2007 bin ich außerdem Teil des "Coordination Team" für das GNOME Translation Projekt.

Zur Zeit studieren ich im 9. Semester Mechatronik an der Friedrich-Alexander-Universität in Erlangen und werde voraussichtlich im Herbst meine Diplomarbeit beginnen.

Bisher habe ich Vorträge am LinuxTag 2008 sowie an der GUADEC 2007 (Birmingham) gehalten, sowie an der GUADEC 2008 (Istanbul) und 2009 (Gran Canaria) teilgenommen.

In den Jahren 2008 und 2009 habe ich mich am Google Summer of Code Programm als Mentor beteiligt und dabei 2008 auch am Mentor Summit in Mountain View/CA teilgenommen.