Advogato blog for wingo

equanimity

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 23:07:20 GMT

word

Equanimous \E*quan"i*mous\, a.
[L. aequanimus, fr. aequus equal + animus mind.]
Of an even, composed frame of mind; of a steady temper; not easily elated or depressed.
[1913 Webster]

Delightful. Makes me think of Medialens folk.

words

I have a new favorite orator: Michael Parenti.

A brief search on the interwebs will only find you his web site, which is a bit off-putting, and doesn't really show to his strengths. But take a listen to Land of Idols (40 minutes), then check out the other talks in that same directory (search for "parenti").

wheels

Set off on what must have been a 100 km loop last Sunday on the bike, after coming back from GUADEC; Google thinks the distance was significantly less. Perhaps I should report a bug?

Meanwhile at home, yet another broken spoke.

sense

It was so quiet walking home this evening that even smelling the street odors made me feel like I was eavesdropping.

guile ? clutter ? quoi ?

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:09:03 GMT

Well, given that I have not figured out how to traverse the great firewall of Bahçeşehir for SMTP+TLS, or, that is, no mail sending... may I claim "first post" for language bindings for Clutter 0.8!

Guile-Clutter 0.8 is out! Download it here: ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/guile-gnome/blah/dee/blah/dee/blah

Or check the fledgling, love-needing docs.

Hack hack hack hack hack

how to choose between equivalent options

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:09:34 GMT

All the time we are presented with options. Should I get my vegetables from the greengrocer's, the supermarket, or the farmer's market? Should I buy a PC or a Mac? Should I start my new project in Ruby or C#? All of these options are equivalent: they're just vegetables, they're just computers, they're just languages. So how to choose?

Some people make choices on technical grounds: for example, "I'm going to buy a Mac because it has a video editor." This is rational, but its rationality degrades over time. The next time you go to buy a computer, you just buy a Mac because it's what you got last time.

To take another example that Robert Collins mentioned on Monday, if you choose bzr over subversion because bzr does merges, what happens in a few months when subversion finally gets merge support? So you make your decision for a reason that turns out not to mean anything. If people go massively for git because of git's workflow and in-place branching, you can be sure that bzr will get the same workflow in the future, and in fact has some of it now.

What I would suggest is that we should make choices not on strictly technical bounds. Instead we should make a choice based on culture. When you choose something to be a part of your future, it affects your culture, the world around you. You invite a tool, a set of people, a set of social relations into your life and into your future.

Technical considerations form a part of culture. Anyone who knows something about Silverlight and Mozilla knows that the technical differences in the projects reflect different values. These values translate into different futures: a world where technology flows from Microsoft, out to the world, or a world in which hackers collaborate in the open to shape their own destiny, our own destiny.

It is especially important not to make decisions about perceived market share, perceived uptake, or the like. For one, these perceptions are easily manipulated. This is the task of the propaganda industry, euphemistically referred to as "public relations". For another, when we choose to invite e.g. GNU into our lives, we affect the future, and especially that part of the future that is in our immediate surroundings.

So in conclusion, and for the GNOME audience, we as hackers build the structures that we are going to live in for a long time. When we make decisions about technology, we begin relationships with people, and to some degree take their values on as our own. We should make sure that we recognize this, and that the values of the technologies we choose mesh with our own, as individuals and as a community.

(For another take on "what makes us the same are not technical similarities, but cultural similarities", and especially in relation to a possible GUADEC / aKademy joint event, see Lambda, the ultimate political party.)

notes from the bosphorus

Wed, 9 Jul 2008 12:11:11 GMT

My camera broke; I have only words.

the golden horn

Istanbul is a town full of wonder. And wander: around the cobbled streets of the old town, in the morning, in the evening, alive at all hours.

Last night I shared a water-pipe under the bridge, looking back on the night silhouette of the old town, smoke rings dissipating over the water. As we were walking back to the hostel some hours later, Dimitris noted the waft of baking bread, the start of a new day.

I stepped out on Sunday morning to the GStreamer mini-summit, but was waylaid by the Blue Mosque. Outside it is grey, hard stone and spired; inside it is lush and tactile, the carpet creeping up between your toes. I believe that space can have rhythm. In that place there was a rich visual soundscape, tiled motifs repeating on the macro level, fractally recursing into micro-vegetation, a symphony of space and lines. I stumbled out into the blue sky.

gstreamer, breakage

The GStreamer summit was pretty good. We decided to switch to git (from CVS), once some issues are ironed out regarding history and our "common" submodule. We also decided that at some point we should do a new development cycle, but that we needed reasons for doing so; the idea would be to develop a number of features that cannot be done with 0.10 in experimental branches, and once there are enough branches, we pull them together in a quick 0.11 and from there to 0.12 or 1.0. This would be a process that could take a year or two.

In that regard, some interesting points were brought up regarding GLib and GTK+'s plan to break ABI for version 3. The problem is that any library that depends on GLib will break ABI as well, and that includes GStreamer. So given that we will need to break ABI to depend on GLib 3, that gives us a good timetable for a next development series, corresponding to GLib 3's release in about 16 months. I suspect that many projects will want to do the same.

stable guile-gnome released

Thu, 3 Jul 2008 18:07:34 GMT

Hackers, slackers, countrymen and countrywomen:

Guile-Gnome-Platform, that beast of the dual hyphen, has finally reached stability. You might say that the API and the ABI are as stable as the hills, but we like to put it like this: "Write once, run anywhen"

(Amused tittering)

From the release notes:

There are several things that are the awesome about this code:
It's fully integrated!
Instances of GObject are objects in Scheme; you can query their properties, class hierarchies, etc at runtime. You can derive new types yourself, with signals, properties, and the like. Good stuff!
It's fully documented!
Start with the tutorial/reference docs for the core GObject wrapper, then branch out into individual modules.
Fully extensible!
Guile-Gnome-Platform also provides a good base off of which to bind other libraries based on GLib. For example, Guile-Clutter binds almost all of the new Clutter library, with documentation, and most of that work was done in a day.
Stable!
Write once, run anywhen! Guile-Gnome's API and ABI will never be changed incompatibly.
Scheme!
You will be assimilated, or alternately, gnawed to death by fingernail clippings.

More info at the homepage. DANGER CAPTAIN: ASSIMILATION IMMINENT

sunset skies; a plea for help; an outgrowing

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 22:08:53 GMT

Good evening!

Here the evening is good indeed -- tepid air, the kind where you don't know it's there until it moves, or you move: skin temperature. We don't get too many colored cloud sunsets, but today there was sky-drama over the wasteland of la Sagrera.

I have a question, to those in the know. It's nargery. I have a machine with intel graphics, a GM965. It claims to support the texture_from_pixmap extension, but I have not been able to make it work, neither in my own code nor in that of others. I whine about it more in the fedora bugzilla. What's the dilly?

conversations

I'm in a fortunate position to have readers that might just be able to answer that question. This is mostly a result of being syndicated on Planet GNOME, although Advogato and individual subscribers do play a role. But it is good to write for an audience.

In that regard, I think that Advogato is a much more appropriate system for publishing and reading, for conversation, than are the various planets out there. Advo has no barrier to entry; anyone can start writing. You can syndicate your writings from elsewhere, like you can with a planet, or write them there if you feel like it. If your writings are good, or interesting, then folks will read them. If some people don't like them, they don't have to see them. If no one likes them, no one will see them.

Granted, present-day advogato does have its problems. It seems that its model of trust has drifted too far from the root nodes; my ratings never affect someone's rank, even to go from observer to apprentice. "Apprentice", while it does correspond to reality in some sense, is seen as demeaning; everyone wants to be a journeyer, if not a master. The front-page articles have been of low quality for a long time. But the diary "interesting-ness" ratings do seem to have stood the test of time.

Project-specific aggregators like Planet GNOME are great. They're wonderful for community, and good for communication too: "this is who we are". But I do miss the easy anarchy of Advogato. Maybe it's time to make an antiplanet, running on mod_virgule. Thoughts?

red pill

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 01:07:43 GMT

I am, in some sense, relieved that Obama won the Democratic primaries this year, defeating the Clinton machine and its +47 cloak of inevitability. It is possible that Obama effect some meaningful change in the US, and in the world.

But.

As an attendee of the recent National Conference for Media Reform noted (edited slightly),

Although there can be something invigorating about being in such a large crowd of like-minded people, I feel more passion and energy in a march, where we are more participants than audience.
Strangely, as I wrote those very words, Naomi Klein spoke of the need to stop treating politicians “as celebrities, as rock stars” - that is, that the public should have an active relationship with their politicians, pushing back and shaping their actions and policies. As she puts it, “the greatest gift you can give Barack Obama” is to keep the pressure on, so when he talks with Wall Street backers he can say “Look: I've got no choice. They’re crazy out there!”

We're crazy out here: being realistic, demanding the impossible!

It is with this perspective that we should approach the upcoming Obama election. Let's cut the rock star crap (in politics and elsewhere: here's looking at you, Jono), and start to focus on organizing to get what we want, on direct action. Obama is an instrument of the people, not an agent for the people; any other formulation is anti-democratic.

Klein continues, in a riveting speech that starts at about minute 43 in this 30 MB MP3:

The hard truth is this: Obama may have the energy, and the anger, and the networks of the anti-war vote, but he does not have a plan to get us out of Iraq.
What he has is a plan to downsize the occupation of Iraq, not to end it.
He talks about keeping the "green zone" intact and calls it ending the war. Let me tell you, you cannot keep the "green zone", which is the symbol of the foreign occupation of Iraq, without a massive troop presence, which includes the military contractors like Blackwater as well.
He may have the very real rage at the income equality that has opened up in this country and around the world, but I am sad to say that he does not have a real plan to close that gap.
And he may have the incredible, inspiring idealism of young environmentalists, who are terrified about the future of this planet, but he does not have a green agenda that is a match to our climate crisis.

the cooling out of america, or: "we, the marks"

I can understand that people want to support Obama. I hope he wins. But how can Big Pharma give $700K to a candidate that will do what needs to be done to US healthcare? (What the hell is a "Health Product" anyway?) Or what about the bankers, the authors of the recent and ongoing securitization debacle and subsequent commodities speculation?

Or, to take things from the other side, where is the money going? Well, it's basically funneling back into the institutions that sold us the Iraq war in the first place: according to my readings of the interwebs, about half a million a day just on television, an American institution so shameful it makes Berlusconi jealous.

Back in the Clinton years, former computer programmer Richard Moore used the red pill / blue pill metaphor of The Matrix to write of the state of popular delusion:

When I started tracing historical forces, and began to interpret present-day events from a historical perspective, I could see the same old dynamics at work and found a meaning in unfolding events far different from what official pronouncements proclaimed. Such pronouncements are, after all, public relations fare, given out by politicians who want to look good to the voters. Most of us expect rhetoric from politicians, and take what they say with a grain of salt. But as my own picture of present reality came into focus, "grain of salt" no longer worked as a metaphor. I began to see that consensus reality -- as generated by official rhetoric and amplified by mass media -- bears very little relationship to actual reality. "The matrix" was a metaphor I was ready for.
Escaping the Matrix, 2000; best listened to over mp3, but also available as text

Among the chief strategies for construction of a humane, red-pill future has to be a creation of new media. The apparati through which we perceive the world must belong to us, and work for our interests, instead of trying to sell us cars and pan bimbo.

In recent months, my most consistent source of political analysis has been Unwelcome Guests. Lyn Gerry is sharp, and caring. I've grown rather fond of her plodding voice. And she's an old hacker of sorts: with a few other folks back in 1996, she founded radio4all, an interwebby place to exchange radio clips for broadcast on community radio. Also, "[t]he Radio Project supports the Free Software Movement, and uses free software wherever possible."

But I digress. Gerry is great. I've probably listened to 400 hours of her shows over the past six months, easily worth more in mind-expansion and education that a number of classes I endured in college, put together. She is my red pill.

a mar revuelto, ganancia de pescadores?

The red pill, once taken, opens the mind past the current Oceania-vs-Eastasia sports-like rivalries that the media take as the gamut of allowable political participation. Obama is not some crazy human hope, object of mystery and fervor -- he is merely a tool, a tool of the people, a stake in the ground in a much larger fight. Gerry says:

It makes me crazy every time I hear some talking head or pundit or politician pretend they didn't know from jump street that, for example, the Bush administration lied about WMD in Iraq. You and I knew it was a lie, and if I, a radio producer with a budget of 0, and a staff of 1, who lives in a rural town with a population slightly above 2000, can find that out and report on it, you bet those well-funded networks can. The people that run them may be craven and they may be cowards, but they're not stupid. They lie to us because they want us to be ignorant and subservient. Knowledge is power, and that's why a free press matters.

So if you find yourself with 20 or 100 bucks, and in an impassioned or drunken moment want to use it to change the world, think twice before clicking "submit" on barackobama.com. Maybe your local community radio or your radical press or Z communications or radio4all.net could use it more.

pompous notes from the passive tense

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 23:09:24 GMT

In the smoky corner of a neighborhood bar, a tarball was rolled, the first Guile-Gnome release to be API and ABI stable; alack, bugs. Publicity was held, is held at bay, until a time of fixage.

A printed and painted certificate arrived via personal courier from Japan, along with a yudansha passport. The latter was carried to the mediterranean island of mallorca, upon which it was signed, after sufficient asskicking. (Asskicking, verb, transitive: kicking of my ass by others, but mostly by the mat; see also: unyielding.)

A new flatmate's arrival was noted upon return from the island. Said person claims to be a Breton but has yet to proffer the galette. Meanwhile, the others comen, cagan, mean, y un poquito más.

regarding decadence

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:17:00 GMT

Quand les gens s’aperçoivent qu’ils s’ennuient, ils cessent de s’ennuyer.
Paris 1968

Regarding my last post, Benjamin said to me that "the biggest omission was a solution to the problem". Well, I don't have a solution, not really anyway. But while the topic is fresh, and it seems to have resonated with a few people, I do have some thoughts on the topic.

technology

I seem to recall Christian complaining about the new GDM animations on login, that they feel slow. Well that's because we have a static conception of interface, that things are static by default, and that motion is the abnormal case. This is a mindset that distorts how we make programs (static with sprinkled animation), and one that does not reflect the way that hardware works these days.

Three years on, Jon Smirl's breakdown of the Free graphics stack is still relevant. Go read it! But instead of his conclusion ("make free applications faster through a new X server"), I would draw the line differently: let us make our applications with GL. Then the applications that we make will be new, 100 times a second.

This hertzian rebirth liberates the computer to react to us, and to anticipate our desires.

For example, as the user starts to focus on an actionable surface, that surface might become more prominent at the same time as other, related actions present themselves. To take a most basic example, if you are typing in a word processor, the mouse cursor goes away. (Or can be made to do so.) If you then grab the mouse again, probably you want to click somethingorother; yet the clickable surfaces are present even when typing, unnecessarily, and are equally small once you do grab the mouse.

Or to take a more familiar example, the "expanding icon" behaviour of the Mac OS dock contextually expands the icon that you are focusing on, and anticipates focus of adjacent choices; and it's something that we still do not have, years later.

It is for these reasons that I think that a GL-based canvas like Clutter is an excellent option for GTK+. The library provides nouns and verbs that compose to make a dynamic, pleasing interface; and if you are programming in a fast language, you can implement your own nouns and verbs, which then form part of the GL rebirth/draw loop.

Another thing to think about is that the mouse is simply a way of indicating focus and a limited form of selection. Our verbs are point, click, and drag. New input methods are here, or coming soon: things like multitouch, head tracking, and gestural recognition. These input methods do not map exactly to the mouse. In fact, once you have such capabilities, other, more "normal" parts of standard interfaces start to look restricting. Menu bars are made for mice and framebuffers; the panel starts to look superfluous; etc.

Obviously this strategy has problems when it comes to power consumption; I do not know the solution. I assume the OpenGL ES people have thought about this somehow.

audience

Whether or not you think these ideas are good or bad, you can rest assured that they will not come to pass in GNOME as it is now.

The problem, to my mind, is that we have painted ourselves into a corner of serving a fictional clientele that is not ourselves. As Havoc says:

Is GNOME for UNIX and shell users? Is it for Linus Torvalds? Is it for ourselves? Is it for American college students? 35-year-old corporate office workers with an IT staff? And are we willing to tell whoever it's not for to jump in a lake?
...There is a default audience if a project doesn't find a way to choose one deliberately, and it's what I've called "by and for developers." If there's no way to stay out of that gravity, it's better to embrace it wholeheartedly IMO...

I think we should have a project for hackers. A GNOME skunkworks, if you will; a place in which hackers can create something new for ourselves, in which innovation and even failed experimentation is possible and encouraged. If something developed there is useful to a wider public, as we would hope would be the case, then by all means folks can pull it out, and start to put it somewhere more stable.

Note that "for hackers" does not necessarily entail complexity; it entails only that complexity which is necessary. Physics does not strive to make ugly theories, string theory aside; we as hackers, though oft maligned, neither want such things. Working together, with the best spirit of peer review, we could come out with something with power, and simplicity, and diversity.

Such a project would question everything: what is our interface metaphor? Is it a desktop? Is it a space, like Neuromancer? Is it a set of overlapping planes, like in Minority Report? Is it something else? What is it populated with? How do we compose separate parts into one graphical whole? How do we choose parts of the whole to focus on, to interact with? What is the nature of a part of the whole? How do focus and applications interact? Does the phrase "switching applications" make sense, and if so, how do we do so, or start new applications? Do applications exist in windows? How do multiple users interact with one live system, when we run GNOME on our TV and on our laptop on the arm of the sofa, and using the wiimote as an input device?

interlude

I think we can learn a couple of things from the Pyro experiment. In case you don't recall, Pyro was an attempt to bring web developers out of the confines of the browser window, to let them manipulate the whole "desktop". It was a really neat hack. It seems to have failed, also; I don't hear much about its uptake, a year later. At the risk of poking Alex's old wounds, we should probably wonder why.

If I were to guess, I would say that Pyro failed for cultural reasons. Its target "audience" was web developers, and also those parts of GNOME that would be comfortable changing desktop development into web development. But web developers like to work for an audience of users, and of these there were not many.

But more than that, and reasonable people may disagree, I think that Pyro failed because it wasn't exciting to the developers that we do have, to our culture. I don't think this situation was particularly gratifying to Alex, who (I would imagine, I do not know) found more fulfillment in other parts of his life. Ah well. "One must bear a chaos inside to give birth to a dancing star."

Regardless of your judgment on Pyro, I think that there's still loads of interesting work to do on "the client side", not least experiments with the GPU and self-renewing interfaces. So we should embrace the hackers that we do have, and see where that takes us.

steps

Let's take a number of cases of existing applications, and see what they might look like, coming out of the skunkworks.

The web browser breaks out of its four walls.

Marvin is browsing planet gnome. The web page fills up the entire screen. He finds some link of interest, and selects it. The Planet GNOME page seems to recede in distance as the new page fades in to replace the full screen.

He reads for a while, somehow scrolling the page, then realizes he wanted to go back to some other link. He bangs the mouse against the edge of the screen, or gives a certain hand gesture, and the web page shrinks down from fullscreen to just one page in a series of pages fading off into the distance, representing his browsing history. As he runs his mouse over that series, the pages pop up under the cursor, with contents if available. The effect is similar to that of flipping pages in a phone book. or passing the mouse over the Mac OS dock.

The "window manager" expands its scope, and admits new forms of input.

Marvin middle-clicks on a link to open it in a new "window". The existing train of web pages slides left, off the screen, leaving space for the new page to fade in. Marvin reads for a while, then decides he wants to get some hacking done. He holds up his hand, pushes back the space, pans his applications around until he is on Emacs, and lets his fingers fall into a fist. Emacs comes close to him and fills him and the screen with its radiant light.

Alternately, Marvin could pan via moving the mouse while holding down the shift key, or pressing some appropriate key combination that does not conflict with his carefully-crafted emacs keybindings.

A photo browser fills the screen.

Erinn, having just finished hacking the good hack, wants to enjoy her photos on the TV in the living room. She sits down on the couch, and grabs the wiimote. She presses a button to open a media navigator, showing her all of the media shares on the home LAN, neuromancer-style. She pilots into the living room machine, selects the photos, and begins browsing. The photos are arranged on a timeline rolling into the distance; she focuses in on the set from last year's GUADEC, and begins flipping through them.

OK, so you see where I want to go with this. Try it yourself, perhaps taking "video chat" as an example. How are calls received? How are they made? How does video chat interact with your photo app, with the rest of your applications?

My point is that although we have reached a kind of local equilibrium with the "desktop" metaphor, the existence of the GPU gives us all kinds of possibilities, unique capabilities of the box connected to the monitor. My ideas (and these are not all mine, I stole most of them from folk at work) are those that I see from here, which is not very far. We can do better than this.

conclusion

I recognize that these are words from a marginal player in GNOME, and a Schemer at that. But I think that somehow, a skunkworks is how GNOME will "revision up", whether it comes from the free community, or whether it is dropped on us from some corporate lab.

The concrete step that interested hackers should take is to learn GL, to play around with it. Use the texture_from_pixmap extensions to pull in a WebKit window or two, toss them around. Use Clutter, if that's what you feel like. Build a video chat application (the Telepathy people swear it's possible), build a new window manager (with tight Ruby bindings), make a mockup. Then if your mockup is inspiring, and organic enough to live in, we can start a GNOME skunkworks to play around in.

But above all, make it for you. Pay no attention to mental questions of how your mother would see this, those questions will fix themselves in time. A focus on beauty and simplicity and power cannot fail to make something interesting. Code against boredom!

gnome in the age of decadence

Sat, 7 Jun 2008 12:14:55 GMT

It is with some trepidation that I go to buy my ticket to this year's european GNOME conference, GUADEC.

Decadence \De*ca"dence\, Decadency \De*ca"den*cy\, n.
[LL. decadentia; L. de- + cadere to fall: cf. F. décadence. See Decay.]
A falling away; decay; deterioration; declension. "The old castle, where the family lived in their decadence." --Sir W. Scott.
[1913 Webster]

Take a look at the list of slated talks. What is your general impression?

Mine is of a large project in a state of marginal returns, in which a larger and larger part of the effort goes to maintenance. On the one hand you have the large deployments, the integration with other software projects. On the other hand the new developments that we have are very careful not to bite off too much: a printing dialog; another revision of ekiga; a new image library.

The problem, as I see it, is that GNOME is in a state of decadence -- we largely achieved what we set out to achieve, insofar as it was possible. Now our hands are full with dealing with entropic decay. Take, for example, Evolution's random walk to improvement. In most releases it's better, in a few it's worse, but basically it still works fine, and has been that way since about 3 or 4 years ago.

It's like, welcome back to 1984's Macintosh plus interweb. We did it!

Seriously though, it does not seem to me that GNOME is on a healthy evolutionary track. By that I mean to say that there is no way there from here, if "there" is universal use of free software, and "here" is our existing GNOME software stack. The evolutionary thing to do would be to do something web-like, because that's where all of the programmers are these days. But that's not part of our culture. Until recently, with WebKit/GTK, it wasn't part of our software stack either -- all of the new web platform bits were dribbled to us over the wall from Mozilla, or embedded within GNOME as Firefox.

The other side of that is that while the web will be a core part of the computing future, it's not clear that swallowing it wholesale is the best strategy for client development. There are too many things that local computing offers: other software paradigms (emacs, unix, independence), unmediated input (sound, video, alternate input devices), direct access to powerful output devices (control part or the entirety of a screen, access the underused GPU).

But even if we eschew "going with the flow"-style evolution, it's not like GNOME is on a revolutionary track which will win in the end with its compelling UI or programming-linguistic metaphors. The screen is still constructed as a static landing strip on which the mouse pointer might alight, an array of possibilities necessarily constricted by decontextualized space. The metaphors are the same: file, folder, desktop, even as these things cease to exist for many people. And techologically, we don't even have a way of considering how the visual elements of space might be anything other than static, much less have any way of interacting with those elements other than the impoverished point and click. What we're left with is the GUI equivalent of chartjunk.

There are exceptions to this story. There's Clutter, which I expect will be the "way out" both for GTK+ and for GNOME. (I know there are technological differences with other canvas models, but at least they have the hackers and the maintenance resources.) There's Moonlight, which is interesting and hacked by very smart folk, but whose fortunes are too bound to Microsoft. There are heroic retrofix efforts like MPX, not really a part of GNOME. But other than that, we have the decay of slavish adherence to the HIG, the logout dialog, the wallpaper chooser, the last-percent efforts of refining an increasingly irrelevant stack of software.

The GTK+ maintainers are well aware of the decadent state of GTK+, and are moving as much as possible to plug the leaks. But it is no longer a nimble codebase, and will take at least 6 and possibly 12 months before a 3.0 release can come out. And that's just stopping retrograde motion; actual construction must take place outside of the "core" until the core is ready for it.

This disenchantment is personal as well: among other things, I've spent thousands of hours on bindings to GNOME libraries, and just now when I am ready to make an API and ABI stable release, I just don't feel like packing another button into another hbox.

Anyway, I'm buying my ticket, but mostly for the hallway track -- GNOME folks are smart and kind, and I want to see what's going on, what people are really thinking about. Istanbul ho!