Guadec II
Dalibor arrived in Stuttgart (08:00 good morning).
Lots of excitement after the Eclipse talk yesterday. People were really interested in the various plugins. The fact that Andrew had a powerbook with a native ppc version of Eclipse made some people really happy. The bugzilla plugin attracted interest. And people were even saying they would drop emacs for native eclipse (I think the talk went a bit too well…)
Today was the talk of Ben and Andrew Cowie Eclipse, Java-GNOME, Glade and GCJ. They made a nice combination. Andrew is pretty down to business. Giving the message “this combination is the only one that makes sense really”. Ben is the demo guru. The java-gnome Eclipse plugin and the quick and dirty slide show presentation application written using that plugin using gcj, java-gnome and glade (he actually used this application to show his slides!) was awesome. Again lots of interest after the talk.
The fact that people keep claiming that “suddenly” GCC 4.0 (gcj) appeared and made it all work is a bit annoying. We have been working on all this stuff for years. But apparently only just now people are seeing that all this actually works and fits perfectly together.
Guadec is interesting because the Gnome community is pretty big and they do work on lots of issues. You have application developers, gtk+ library hackers and kernel hackers doing interesting interaction. What was kind of missing though were the gcc, glibc, GNU autotools and friends. I think there could be some pretty interesting interaction with these groups. Gnome is now so big that they really should tackle the whole platform more constructively. Lots of talk is either detailed on specific applications, libraries or new cool kernel stuff or really high level stuff about “the next big thing” (collaboration?) or defining “what Gnome is” (not a distribution?). It isn’t really clear to me how or what Gnome as a whole should concentrate on now next. Maybe the Gnome community is so big now that they should actually break up into smaller communities that do some smaller parts really well. It will be interesting watching how Gnome goes forward. I am looking forward to better integrate our core libraries with the Gnome desktop.