To: editor@lwn.net, editors@linuxtoday.com
Subject: X desktop group
From: Havoc Pennington <hp@redhat.com>
Date: 25 Apr 2000 23:22:36 -0400


Hi,

At the start of the month I quietly launched a small project called
the X Desktop Group; you can read about its goals here:

  http://www.freedesktop.org/about/mission.html

In a nutshell, freedesktop.org is a shared forum and CVS server where
developers from different X-desktop-related software projects can work
together on documentation or code of interest to the X desktop
community as a whole. This could include interoperability standards,
libraries below the GUI toolkit layer, X enhancements, or whatever
people want to work on. It looks like the first item on the agenda is
to finalize and bless the window manager specification that's been in
the works for a while.

Note that this is a work project, not a diplomacy project or a
post-wildly-speculative-proposals-to-the-mailing-list project.
Please, if you aren't going to contribute expertise, code, docs, or
HTML, don't clutter up the mailing lists. I'd like to preserve good
signal-to-noise ratio. Of course if you _are_ going to contribute,
please do!

There's been slow but steady progress on desktop interoperability and
shared technology over the last half-year or so; XDG is more an
attempt to formalize this existing progress than it is a new
project. www.freedesktop.org is a place where we can store the results
of our efforts, and a central resource for developers who wish to
write interoperable applications.

Things look promising so far; many of the "people that matter" are
getting involved in this effort, including GNOME/KDE core maintainers,
and the LSB. Ideally, we can build a bit of a cross-desktop developer
community. Because the people that need to be involved are already
very busy with their own technology implementations, I don't expect
extremely rapid results, but I do expect steady progress.

Don't hesitate to contact me with questions or comments.

Havoc

hp@redhat.com
(919) 547 0012 x386