I don’t know why, but I felt tired and sort of depressed most of the day. Unsub’d from some lists, which felt helpful, but still just felt overwhelmed. Did do some minor liveCD stuff towards the end of the day, which helped some. Hopefully I’ll be in a better mood tomorrow for my exam, and for the release.
The GUADEC name discussion on foundation-list is probably part of the reason for my bad mood; I think Glynn nailed it on the head– for the energy expended on that discussion we could already have a website and a written CFP. Or god forbid, maybe someone could have written out a clear, simple mission statement for GUADEC so that we understood whether or not the name actually mattered to the people we’re trying to reach with GUADEC, instead of blathering on with no common idea what we’re trying to achieve and hence no way to accurately assess whether or not a name change is a good idea.
Was also irritated to see a global, standardized solution that can be used and most importantly improved by all of us compared unfavorably to the gross, per-distro, unstandardized hacks that many distros used to use. Am glad that most people see the wisdom of moving these things out of the distros and into the broader communities. (Relatedly, am still alternately amused and annoyed by the opensuse faq still calling yast an ‘open standard’.)
On the plus side, holy cow is the new splash screen sweet. I still think we should have a 2.13.0 ‘remove the splash screen’ contest for hackers, but then we can just use this cool stuff as backgrounds :) In that vein, I am looking forward to seeing all of Lorenzo’s startup time improvements land. In general, if even half of the things mentioned on d-d-l for evo, gnome-meeting, etc. land in 2.14, it’ll be a very nice release for users. And if the gtk team can keep their focus on the core goal of ridley (cut lots of crap out of the platform) 2.16 will be a very nice devel platform.