In the last month or so, Gnome has really pushed forward quite a bit. At the same time, desktop-devel-list became a good place to post your rants and flames, and suddenly everyone became a bit more sensitive than usually.
I guess it was holiday season, after all ;)
I'll try to summarize what has been going on.
First of all, as someone noted on Planet GNOME, Ximian is slowly taking over Novell ;). Novell hired Rob Love (a Linux kernel hacker) to work on desktop integration issues, but this is already old news.
Real news is that Rob is doing very well, which means there's stuff like Gnome Volume Manager. It's good stuff, and he has promised to put it into CVS soon.
The other big stuff around desktop-devel-list is discussion of proposed modules for Gnome 2.6. Since module selection time is (I think, check the release map at yourself, I'm lazy now ;) January 12th, it got pretty heated up. As it seems, most of the proposed modules are not going in (monkey-bubble, g-s-t, gnome-network), some are already in (gnome-keyring, gswitchit), and others are still debatable (rhythmbox, evolution, gal, gtkhtml and evolution-data-server). I'd like Evolution to be in the desktop, but I'd prefer Totem over Rhythmbox (alas, Totem was not even proposed this time, even though it was accepted in 2.4 timeframe, but withdrawn at maintainer's request later on). Actually, what I'd like even more is to see evolution-data-server, and simple addressbook and calendar application. Though, I don't see those simple apps anywhere ;)
Still in the Gnome news, GVADEC (Gnome Users And Developers European Conference) is on schedule for June 28-30, 2003 in Kristiansand, Norway, and there's a call for papers, as well. Call for papers seems modified (I first noticed it with a deadline for abstracts of February 1st, not 16th as it is now), which probably reflects issues Miguel raised in this mail: not enough abstracts submitted, because CFP indicates that they want research papers. That's fine for the D in GUADEC, but it wouldn't really work for the U. I think it will be tragic if it stays that way.
For the rest of the stuff, turn to Planet GNOME, puppet of Jeff's, on a new fancy address.
At the same time, I notice a couple of folks I know started blogging more actively: Jordi Mallach of Debian, and Catalan translator in Gnome, Carlos Perelló Marín (once a Spanish translator, creator of current translation status pages, and most recently, author of a nice Locale and Culture configuration applet).
The new Carlos' applet is good stuff — I hope this will mean no more explaining to folks what is LC_ALL, LANG, LANGUAGE, what priorities do they take, what's LC_MESSAGES, etc. Yeah, I surely hope this will help folks choose their own language in a more natural and easier way.