lubuntu-desktop team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Marsden <jmarsden@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 05/22/2011 08:41 PM, PCMan wrote:

> After this one is finished, I'll try to find some time to fix other
> bugs in the file manager.

> As for other lx-* stuff, I currently don't have enough time to fix
> them. Really glad that you can help.

OK.  Personally, I think that when developer time is really really
limited (which it seems to be!), we should focus on the basics:

(1) Fix all major bugs that are biting our users, and then

(2) Code cleanup needed to ensure it builds and runs with newer
compilers, libraries, etc. (e.g. GTK3 transition, and GCC 4.6 is in
Debian sid already... so we need to check LXDE builds fine there, and
fix it if not).

After that, if we possibly can, we then do

(3) occasional official source tarball releases (maybe every six months?
 or every 12 months if every six is too much work).  This is so that the
work that *is* getting done in (1) and (2), even if fairly small, is
more easily available to users, and to other Linux distributions,
without them having to dive into a git tree.

[From a Ubuntu/Lubuntu perspective, we probably need a new

*Anything* at all more than that, things like new enhancements, test
suite, refactoring code, etc. should be considered a luxury, a *bonus*;
we should not plan for it at all, unless we have the developer time to
do it!

This approach is not much fun for programmers (no new fancy
functionality to design and code!), but IMO it is what allows a project
to stay alive and remain at least somewhat useful to users.  Hopefully,
our doing (1), (2) and (3) consistently and reliably (and well!) will
attract more developers who like LXDE... so we can then do more of the
fun stuff.

Does this make sense?

> 3. lxterminal: currently we have no maintainer for it. Previously a
> friend on our mailing list is willing to take over it. So maybe we'll
> have a new maintainer later. Another option can be using Roxterm
> instead.

Given my tendency to sit at the command line a lot, I *might* be able to
take this on, but not yet, and this is not yet a committment, OK!  I am
not much of a GUI/GTK programmer at this point.  But perhaps once
Oneiric is out, I could think more seriously about taking maintainership
of lxterminal on for the longer term.

> These are my current plans. Any suggestions are appreciated.

See above.  I think your plans are fine, but may be ambitious given how
small a team we are.  I would suggest (you probably will not feel good
about this!) that you work on bug fixes even in lx* programs before
adding anything new at all to any of them.  Keeping current LXDE users
at least reasonably happy is #1 priority, if you want the project to
survive.  Users do not like significant bugs.  Sorry if that sounds a
bit negative, but it would be my main suggestion after reading your plans.

Jonathan