8/13/2005
What is Gentopia?
What is the idea and goal behind Gentopia you ask? It is to provide the Gentoo user community with a well integrated and functional desktop experience (please note that when I say “desktop experience” I am also including “laptop experience” in this statement) as provided by other distributions and take that desktop experience to the next level by encouraging work on the next generation of desktop functionality. As many of you know there is a wide array of Gentoo developers responsible for the applications covering a user’s desktop experience. All these developers have their own way of working through bugs and testing their segments of maintainer-ship. Some provide their own overlays and blog about it. Some provide their packages in a package.mask and write -dev & -core about it. However this leads to sections being tested independently and then bugs cropping up later. This is where Gentopia comes in.
Gentopia originates from Robert Love’s Project Utopia (this is why were denied the alias gentopia@gentoo.org and instead given utopia@gentoo.org). The idea is to bring this ideal to Gentoo rather then letting SUSE bask in a utopia of desktop usability. Gentopia is all about bringing that “shine and polish” to Gentoo and the Linux desktop environment. The first step is to bring this development work to a centralized location so more integration and focus can be made, this will in turn increase the testing before the ebuilds and software is placed in the Portage tree. Gentopia does not seek to replace/displace or remove focus from the Portage tree but instead looks to improve it.
We will encourage testing and development to happen. For example, right now the new dbus/hal’s are residing in Gentopia. These ebuilds will lay the ground work for the versions that will appear in the Portage tree when they are required by upstream software. The fixes and the integration work learned from these builds will improve the ebuilds that will eventually reside in the Portage tree. We look to build upon that and get more developers involved.
We’d love to see .NET based applications for the desktop, such as F-spot and Beagle (which already lives there) be developed in the Gentopia tree. As well as new Gnome and GTK+ releases working on the new Xorg and Cairo platforms. As well as the new QT and KDE work happening out there. All of this work to improve integration and communications between developers and groups and increase the testing done the software before it hits the live tree.
What we’d like to see. Gnome developers from the x86, amd64 and ppc arches as well as KDE from the x86, amd64 and ppc arches. This will allow for better keywording and more testing. Remember, the bottom line is proper development and improvement of the desktop experience across the board.
What do we need to accomplish this? Obviously Gentopia could not really reside in the Portage tree. That would be a lot of tinkering with the mask and it would be unnecessary. So we’ve established our own SVN repo, which we would like hosted @ Gentoo’s infra. But we noticed a bunch of bugs against Gentopia work were being filed in Gentoo’s Bugzilla, and that’s not really appropriate so we wrapped our SVN install with a Trac install for Bug tracking as well as the Wiki functionality to keep up on notes on what is being worked on. Again, increasing the communication of development. We would like all this hosted on Gentoo’s infrastructure (read: network) but are not requesting the compromise of lark by adding SVN+Trac on lark. We have even gone as far as to offer a completely separate box with which to host this on. The only thing that the box would need is access to ldap.gentoo.org so that we could authenticate Gentoo developers, rather then maintaining our own database for authentication.
Filed under: General, Gentopia, Linux
2 Responses to “What is Gentopia?”
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August 14th, 2005 at 2:03 pm
Hi Doug, would you like/mind if I take your little blog here and use it as an article for one of the editions of the MyOSS magazine? (http://mag.my-opensource.org). Heck, if you can shine and polish it up to include some of the goodies that project Gentopia/Utopia brings to Linux/Open Source, I think it would be great.
Let me know. You have my email address.
August 15th, 2005 at 7:45 pm
Sure. Let me polish up the post a little first and add the details about the different aspects of the project.