Hello everyone,
I just want to add to Daniel's announcement that I'm pleased to see
elementary take up this torch and run with it. Shotwell is an
important piece of software for me, both personally (as someone who
devoted many hours to crafting it) as well as speaking as a Yorban.
As Daniel mentioned, I'll be available to discuss the how's and why's
behind Shotwell's code and design and offer any guidance I can. I
don't want to impose as a guiding hand and tell people how things
should be done. I will say that most decisions we made with Shotwell
involved weighing alternatives as well as taking input from our users
and confronting technical limitations. Please feel free to ask to
consult me! Chances are we here at Yorba know about the problem and
have some insight about related pitfalls.
Although slightly out-of-date, I do recommend anyone diving into
Shotwell take a look at our architecture overview:
https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Shotwell/Architecture
I've also subscribed to the Pantheon Photos bug list and will probably
be chiming in from time to time with notes.
I think this move is beneficial to elementary, Yorba, and our
collective users. Here's to the future of photo management on the Free
Desktop!
-- Jim
On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 12:13 PM, Daniel Foré
<dan...@elementaryos.org> wrote:
Hey Team,
I’ve been talking to Jim Nelson (President of Yorba) about Shotwell
for a while now and here’s the quick and dirty: Shotwell needs a
new maintainer. Ubuntu has the Gallery app, Fedora has GNOME photos,
and Yorba just doesn’t have the resources anymore to maintain
Shotwell. Their focus is on Geary. So that pretty much leaves us or
an unknown to take up the mantel.
Jim seems really excited about the idea of Shotwell becoming a part
of our community. He thinks we have the talent and the vision to
bring it up to date and make it into a really great app. But
there’s a small caveat: Yorba recently joined the GNOME development
community. So officially, development is done in GNOME git and
bugzilla and their wiki, etc. Which is obviously not ideal for us.
Enter the solution: After some discussion with Jim, we think the best
course of action is for elementary to fork Shotwell. I’ve taken the
liberty of setting up a launchpad page for Pantheon Photos. It is
currently maintained by elementary-apps team, but I think we’ll
want to create a Pantheon Photos team as Jim wants to stay in the
loop on development, but we don’t want to spam him with all the
other elementary apps stuff.
Firstly, I know that this is a big responsibility to take on. I think
as a community, we can do it. Having Photos in launchpad and under
the umbrella of the elementary apps team will allow us a lot more
freedom for casual involvement with the code base. Not to mention,
Jim has already stated that he is available to answer anyone’s
questions or give guidance regarding how Shotwell’s code is
structured, things to watch out for, etc.
I think this is going to be a really positive move for our photos app
and I’m looking forward to working with all of you on building a
really great Photos experience in elementary OS.
--
Best Regards,
Daniel Foré
elementaryos.org
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