Coder's Log

The party turned out to be a lot more successful than I thought. I thought only a few people will show-up since there aren't that many gnomies around that I know of. We had lots of nice discussions on various topics especially the future of GNOME and Free SW in general. One of the participants was very interested in having some way to write UIs that work for both big screens and tiny screen of his Openmoko mobile phone, which turned out to be quite an interesting discussion. Taking the EXOPC running Fedora 16 with me was indeed a good idea since almost every participant wanted to see how it works. Although I had to keep telling/reminding everyone that on-screen-keyboard in gnome-shell is not exactly finished, I noticed that people were pretty much already able to use GNOME 3.2 with a touch-only interface. The biggest issue people encountered wasn't the OSK though but the bad touch-screen on the tablet. Some pictures from the event:

Turns out that not many Free Software maintainers follow the practice of writing proper release logs targetted for packagers/end-users. To justify their laziness, they come-up with lame excuses like "Oh, the user never sees the release log" etc and at the very most copy&paste the (developer oriented) VCS changelog since the last release. Here is how it actually affects a user: Now if you click on the URL provided, you will be taken to a page where there is a lot of information but the one you are looking for: What exactly changed? In this particular case, its just an bugfix release but many times new features are added and users can't know that unless you put that nicely in your release log. So please stop justifying your laziness and take the efforts to write the release log if you are a maintainer of a Free Software project. OTOH, if you are a downstream packager, please copy or link to the upstream release log in your package's changelog that upstream main...