[java-gnome-hackers] java-gnome future

[Mark H. <mh...@ti...>]

Hi,
  I've been thinking this for a while, but have kept quiet so far.

Java-gnome is a good system. It is the only way of making gnome
applications with java and so could be very useful for open source linux
applications. There are many people developing these things. 

I am concerned that java-gnome is not getting the attention it needs. As
a result, not enough people are contributing bug reports and patches (to
both java-gnome and free JVMs). From this, we are in the situation where
we haven't had a release supporting gtk2.0 despite gtk2.2 being released
at the start of the year.
I think the cause of this is the java-gnome release strategy. At the
moment it seems to be that releases should be made only when we have a
stable system and that developers can check out cvs - this rarely
happens.

java-gnome seems to be going against the general open source tradition
of releasing early and often. I personally feel that we should have many
more releases - for example fixing the uiinfo code would warrant a
release, as would the String handling changes and treemodel api changes.
This means releasing code (as a development release - with adequate
warnings) which is known to be broken in places and will have (possibly
major) api changes between revisions. We would then probably get to 0.76
before releasing version 1.0 - I have no problems with that. 

When these releases are made, people would see the announcements and so
more people would hear about the project. More importantly, people who
already know about the project will see that it's getting better and
might feel like giving it a try. 

The release early and often strategy is proven to work - almost all open
source projects do this for their development versions.

Why doesn't java-gnome follow this strategy?
What does everyone else think about this?
-- 
  .''`. Mark Howard
 : :' :
 `. `'  http://www.tildemh.com
   `-   mh...@de... | mh...@ti... | mh...@ca...