my blog

Tuesday 4 March 2008

MoFo and GNOME

Our friends at Mozilla love us and we also love them. It's been a really good relationship for years now. So, at the end of last year, when Chris started working at the Mozilla Corporation, we quickly started talking about what we can do together. Mozilla and GNOME have lots of things in common. Technical things, of course, but also, and that's way more important, our communities both share some values, like freedom and innovation. Therefore the GNOME Foundation invited the Mozilla Foundation to join our advisory board, and we also discussed various cooperation ideas. One of the result of those discussions is the GNOME Outreach Program: Accessibility (which Google, Canonical and Novell later joined as sponsors), something we're really proud of.

As a summary, we've been making our collaboration a bit more official, and we're playing with new ideas! And we've finally announced all this. Okay, this was not a secret since quite some time (Chris talked about it back in January, eg) ;-) Welcome to the advisory board, MoFo, and I'm glad we'll be able to do a lot of cool things together!

Two planets, two mailing lists

Woohoo, I've progressed in my quest to rule the world. Oh, those are secret plans, I shouldn't talk about them here, I guess. Anyway, I got added to Planet freedesktop.org and Planet SUSE. Hi there! Since I still didn't enter the aggressive mode for another secret plan (you know, the one about making french the only true language), only the english posts should show there. Yeah, I know, it's a bit sad... Did I hear someone say "yay, less blog entries from this guy?" ;-)

So, today, I want to tell you about two new freedesktop.org mailing lists which should be of interest to at least some people: ftp-release and distributions.

The goal of the first one is to be the place where announces of new releases for projects hosted by freedesktop.org should go. It seems a good idea since, for example, nobody knows when a new desktop-file-utils release is out and so it doesn't get packaged anywhere. I'd love to see some Xorg announces there, and also some telepathy, poppler, swfdec, etc. announces. You can simply cc the list if you still want to send the announces to your development mailing list. It would help make the world a better place, at least for some packagers, I guess. Sure, tt's not perfect since right now, maintainers need to write the mail themselves, but maybe at some point in the future, we'll be able to improve the freedesktop.org infrastructure and get this done automatically in some way.

The distributions list is an interesting project to get some cross-distribution collaboration. It's not about which one is better? or some other totally cool debate, but really about some low-level topics that could help improve the overall quality of distributions. Oh, and it's distributions as in free software distributions, not as in Linux or GNU/Linux distributions, so everybody is welcome, including our friends working on OpenSolariis, *BSD, etc. Lucas, who pushed for the creation of this list, has more details about it. I'm happy because this mailing list will make it possible for me to start working on another (small) secret plan that could be interesting to many distributions.

Hrm, maybe I have too many secret plans? I guess I'll just postpone a bit the one about ruling the world... Anyway, everybody, go subscribe to those two lists. I know you'll feel empty if you don't do so now.

by Vincent