= GNOME+Mono Hackfest 2011 = (the page says 2010 for historical reasons)
Brussels, the 7th - 11th of February 2011 (directly after FOSDEM 2011)
Primary contact: Andreas Nilsson <andreas@andreasn.se>
Secondary contact: David Nielsen <gnomeuser@gmail.com> (Please use me as primary contact, Andreas is only officiall listed as such since the guide recommends PC be a Foundation member and he expressed cautious interest previously)
Relevant GNOME team
No GNOME .NET team exists currently
Description
Mono is part of the GNOME platform, and while Mono helps fuel some of the leading GNOME applications such as Tomboy and Banshee, the story told for .NET developers on GNOME has many holes.
The ndesk-dbus issue:
There is a long standing need to address ndesk-dbus which has lingered for some time and is the source of many bugs in applications today. A new DBus-sharp fork (http://github.com/mono/dbus-sharp/wiki/Release-notes-dbus-sharp-0.7-and-dbus-sharp-glib-0.5) has begun but it still suffers from a number of issues and we need to port our existing applications to it as well as ensuring that distributions carry it. There is also with the merging of gdbus in glib the argument made that gobject-introspection will make the dbus-sharp effort obsolete. Regardless an agreement must be made and all major applications ported to the new solution. Ndesk-dbus is holding the .NET experience back and regardless of what we do to fix the situation, a flag day is coming and the hackfest is a great chance to get this work done.
The untold GNOME 3 Story for .NET:
We have only incomplete bindings available for the GNOME platform and GNOME 3 is going to be a problem. These bindings are also mostly only available as unreleased git trees spread amongst various services such as github/gitorious/gnome git and there thus seems to be no true "upstream gnome .NET" package for developers to refer to. The story told for .NET developers in GNOME today is suboptimal and GNOME3 is going to be a problem unless we take action.
Luckily Alan McGovern has started work on gobject-introspection for .NET (https://github.com/alanmcgovern/mono-introspect). Alan has been invited to the hackfest and has already booked flights to attend. Getting the gobject-introspection story told will help us greatly figuring out how to transition popular and highly deployed applications to the new world order. For the hackfest, the scope should be to tentatively have a technology preview release of this work enabling applications developers to take part in shaping the .NET GNOME 3 experience in the following months.
Users will benefit from the the ndesk-dbus change nearly immediately as many race conditions should be fixed and regardless of which solution is picked application stability should go up. Application developers will get an early view of the .NET GNOME 3 story and porting examples.
Agenda, goals
The overarching theme of the first GNOME+Mono Hackfest should be the GNOME 3 story for which there currently exists defacto none.
We will address this by first tackling the longstanding problem of our DBus implementation gaining us a new active upstream and application stability.
- NDesk-dbus porting
Complete Alan McGovern's gobject-introspection work to at least a technology preview release.
- Coverage of core GNOME3 via gobject-introspection
Measuring your success
A successful GNOME+Mono hackfest would entail delivering a compelling story for .NET developers, while it is not expected that all bindings will be finished, having the core GNOME services available to .NET developers would be a major improvement.
Having a solid foundation for how to deal with gobject-introspection.
All major maintained applications ported to DBus-sharp or GBus# as decided.
Attendants
Confirmed:
Alan McGovern (flights already booked)
- Timothy Howard (will require travel compensation otherwise indicated strong interest and availability)
- David Nielsen (organizing blogging and reporting, tickets booked, will miss day one of FOSDEM and thus the Mono room but will be there till the 12th to help with cleanup.)
- Olivier Dufour (can only make it the 7th - 9th - tickets and hotel booked)
- Bertrand Lorentz (can likely only participate for a few days depending on travel schedule)
- Jérémie Laval
- Jensen Somers (probably just a visit)
- Jonathan Ernst (Flights booked, will be at the hackfest till the 8th)
Unconfirmed:
- Aaron Bockover (Has a busy travel schedule, it is unknown if Aaron will even make it to FOSDEM)
- Ruben Vermeersch (Will be at FOSDEM and ill run the Mono room on Saturday, due to his schedule it is uncertain if he will feature at the hackfest)
- Miguel de Icaza
- Mike Hutchinson (Interest but has problems obtaining a visa)
- Josh Holland (Interest but schedule and finances look shady, though we have worked out a free solution for the stay if he can make it)
Unfortunate regrets:
- Gabriel Burt has indicated that he is unable to come
- Mirco Bauer has indicated that he is unable to come
- Jo Shields (will be at FOSDEM but will be unable to attend the hackfest)
- Alex Launi (will be busy with Unity work and is unable to make it)
However as the Hackfest is intended to follow FOSDEM, it will be open to all interested parties. It would also likely reduce transportation costs and given that deals with hotels already are likely to have been made for FOSDEM there is a chance for piggybacking on this effort to save costs.
Costs
1300$ - Travel and stay compensation for Tim Howard
700$ - Travel and stay compensation for David Nielsen
200$ - Voluntary donation for Hackerspace.be for use of location
Total budget
2200$
Current sponsors
Preliminary interest from Canonical
How to get there
Hackerspace.be is located close to the FOSDEM location.
Accommodation and food
I suggest to avoid duplication of effort that people examine FOSDEMs excellent accomodation page. Searches on the Bed & Breakfast page should use ULB as the "near" setting to get results closest to FOSDEM and the Hackfest.
http://fosdem.org/2011/practical/accommodation
Previous discussions, organization threads, drafts, relevant links, etc
There is a lot of excitement in our community about what we can do with the push of this hackfest. We have a vision for the GNOME .NET experience and the budding tools to get there. Everyone involved expects to get a lot of work done and hopefully everyone will be blown away with how much of an improvement we can present for GNOME 3 over our current GNOME 2 patch work platform. Olivier has also pledged to work on TV Show support in Banshee during the hackfest which has so far involved splitting out the Video Source as an extension so now users can disable it at will. Tim Howard has been completing F-Spot on Windows but he has expressed strong interest in working with Alan McGovern on GObject-Introspection during the hackfest. There is a lot of energy in our community and we look forward to directing it towards the future development platform for .NET developers.