Hey Team,
I’ve been talking to Jim Nelson (President of Yorba) about Shotwell
for a while now and here’s the quick and dirty: Shotwell needs a
new maintainer. Ubuntu has the Gallery app, Fedora has GNOME photos,
and Yorba just doesn’t have the resources anymore to maintain
Shotwell. Their focus is on Geary. So that pretty much leaves us or
an unknown to take up the mantel.
Jim seems really excited about the idea of Shotwell becoming a part
of our community. He thinks we have the talent and the vision to
bring it up to date and make it into a really great app. But
there’s a small caveat: Yorba recently joined the GNOME development
community. So officially, development is done in GNOME git and
bugzilla and their wiki, etc. Which is obviously not ideal for us.
Enter the solution: After some discussion with Jim, we think the best
course of action is for elementary to fork Shotwell. I’ve taken the
liberty of setting up a launchpad page for Pantheon Photos. It is
currently maintained by elementary-apps team, but I think we’ll
want to create a Pantheon Photos team as Jim wants to stay in the
loop on development, but we don’t want to spam him with all the
other elementary apps stuff.
Firstly, I know that this is a big responsibility to take on. I think
as a community, we can do it. Having Photos in launchpad and under
the umbrella of the elementary apps team will allow us a lot more
freedom for casual involvement with the code base. Not to mention,
Jim has already stated that he is available to answer anyone’s
questions or give guidance regarding how Shotwell’s code is
structured, things to watch out for, etc.
I think this is going to be a really positive move for our photos app
and I’m looking forward to working with all of you on building a
really great Photos experience in elementary OS.
--
Best Regards,
Daniel Foré
elementaryos.org
