The GNOME Roadmap Archive

This page holds the roadmap for previous stable releases of GNOME. If you want to see the current official roadmap, have a look at RoadMap page.

To know more about our Roadmap process, go to RoadMap/Process

GNOME 2.22

For Users

Artwork

• Remove LargePrint icon theme

• Support for placeholder icons
• Add .pc files for a11y themes, so applications can install their own a11y icons

• Fix canvas in available HighContrast-SVG icons

• Misc consistency improvements:
  • Focus rings in the different themes
  • Expander in Clearlooks theme
  • Support for fill levels in other engines

• Remove the Low Contrast icons (Under discussion)

• Improvements on the default look of GDM
• Complete gnome-icon-theme

• More HighContrast icons, especially for application launchers

Deskbar Applet

• Support for NewStuffManager (soon to be renamed to Capuchin): easy download of additional plugins from internet

• Full Evolution address book search
• Performance improvements

Ekiga VoIP Client

• Release of 3.0
  • Support for audio and video codecs on the form of plugins (allowing H.263, H.264 to be used through appropriate plugins)
  • New user interface
  • SIP Presence support (to know if somebody is away, in a call, and so on)
  • Xvideo support
  • A better Win32 version thanks to DirectX support (sound, video, display)
  • IAX2 support

Epiphany Web Browser

• Experimental WebKit backend

Evince Document Viewer

• Annotation support (SoC Project 2007)

• Support for page transition effects on presentations
• Improve UI feedback when opening remote files, exposing document metadata and others
• Support for specials and printing in DVI
• Migration to gio/gvfs
• Improved selections (selecting images, images + text, etc)
• Improved History handling
• Thumbnails in file chooser
• Stability, test coverage and proper documentation
• Perfomance and efficiency improvements

Evolution Groupware

• Non-intrusive error reporting (Read more)

• Message Tagging (aka Custom Labels)
• External editor support
• Google Calendar support
• Option to disable search folders (can improve memory)

Evolution Data Server

• Google Calendar backend
• Stability, and minimize the memory requirement

Eye of GNOME Image Viewer

• Set of powerful plugins
• Printing multiple images per sheet
• Support for IPTC metadata
• Misc improvements on plugin API
• Misc usability improvements

Gedit Text Editor

• Migration to GtkPrint

• Migration to gio/gvfs
• Remove libgnome[ui] dependency

GNOME Control Center

• New Localization capplet with keyboard layout and language

• New Input Devices capplet with Keyboard, Mouse, and others (Under discussion)

• New Screen capplet with screen resolution, screen saver, and xrandr
• Desktop Effects in Appearance capplet
• More performance improvements in gnome-settings-daemon

• libslab API review and bonobo replacement with GtkUnique

GNOME Desktop

• Finish moving the docs to the gnome-user-guide module
• Rewrite gnome-about so that it looks better, and fix related a11y bugs
• Remove all deprecated icons

GNOME Display Manager (GDM)

• Redesign of GDM so that it makes use of D-Bus for all interprocess communications
• Revamp of configuration management system so it is based on XML
• Redesign of gdmsetup

GNOME Doc Utils

• Mallard, the new topic-oriented help format

GNOME Games

• Aisleriot
  • Animation/arrow to better visualize hints
• Chess
  • Fix remaining crashers in glChess
  • Support for GGZ networking
• Gnometris
  • Fix performance problems on new theme
• Gtali
  • Tooltips for the score table
  • Undo feature
• Robots
  • Make robots resizable/translatable
• Sudoku
  • Revamped game-saving/restoring with a vastly simplified interface
  • File-based system to store information about generated and played puzzles for better error handling

GNOME Keyboard Handling (libgnomekbd)

• Use explicit gettext-based translation to retrieve localized layout descriptions

GNOME Keyring

• Support for using blank passwords with keyrings which results in an unencrypted keyring.
• Initial support for X.509 certificates and keys.
• SSH agent based on new certificate and key store.
• Basic PKCS#11 integration to make gnome-keyring a certificate and key store.
• Simpler API for using passwords and secrets from gnome-keyring.

GNOME Panel

• Time zone support in the clock applet
• Support for editing the menu layout on Menubar and Main Menu, not only the application menu
• Fix positioning of applets when the panel size changes
• Nice effect when clicking on a launcher

GNOME System Tools

• HAL integration
• rtnetlink integration (Linux only)

• Optional PolicyKit use

GNOME On-screen Keyboard

• Work on Firefox 3 accessibility interoperability

• Fix remaining hardware issues related to use of FreeDesktop.org's XEvIE

GNOME Utils

• Dictionary
  • Support for local files (dict and possibly stardict)
  • Custom definitions to a local database
  • Wikipedia support

  • Migration to GtkPrint

  • Show and select sources from the sidebar
• GFloppy
  • Replace with the GNOME Formatter, a true media formatter
• Screenshot
  • Desktop area grabbing
  • Support actions: save, copy to clipboard, and open with

  • Switch save dialog to a pure GtkFileChooser

  • Rewrite the capture logic and make it work properly under Compiz
• System Log Viewer
  • Plugin system to handle different log sources

Metacity Window Manager

• Support for multi-screen full screening
• Code/infrastructure refactoring of the handling of transients

• Support for MPX (Multiple Pointer X) (SoC Project 2007)

Nautilus File Manager

• Migration to gio/gvfs

Orca

• Phase out Orca's atspi.py in favor of pyatspi.py
• Aggressive bug fixing and performance work

• Speech Refactoring (+)

  • Support switching between multiple locales
  • Support finer granularity of voices
• Braille refactoring

  • Support better input/control from Braille device (text selection, navigation, etc.) (+)

  • Support display of text attribute information
  • Support contracted Braille
• Better support for AJAX and ARIA on Firefox 3.0
• Provide compelling access to Thunderbird 3.0

• Provide compelling/useful access to OpenOffice Impress (+)

• Provide compelling/useful access to OpenOffice Database (+)

(+) = if time permits

Seahorse Encryption Keys Manager

• Complete implementation of missing gnome-keyring-manager features (Access Control Lists)

Totem Video Player

• MythTV plugin
• Better playlist drag and drop
• Full DVB support
• Better support for text subtitle selection

Session Management

• Better integration with Autostart
• More flexibility and convenience for distributors on defining their default session applications
• D-Bus API for log out/reboot/shutdown (with save session) operations

Tomboy Notes

• Automatic/Background Synchronization
• Support for tasks inside notes
• Support for note tagging

Vino Desktop Remote Access

• Clipboard support between VNC client and server
• New VNC client well integrated to GNOME
• "Advanced" settings on configuration applet

Yelp Help Viewer

• Improved stylesheets (layout) for printing and docbook
• Improved table 'o contents
• Support for Mallard

Zenity

• Support for multitask in progress dialog
• Support for setting dialog button labels

For Developers

Accerciser

• New validation plugin

AtSpi

• Initial work on removing Bonobo dependency
• Feasibility study for migration to D-bus

DevHelp API Documentation Browser

• User interface for easily installing new books

• WebKit support

• Misc UI improvements

GnomeVFS

• Migration to gio/gvfs

Gail

• Better accessibility support for GTK+

Glade

• Support for various output formats (glade files for libglade & for gtk+ builder)

• Allow developers to add custom code for editing and (de)serializing their custom widgets/properties

Pango

• Move to new HarfBuzz code base that uses mmap()ed font files, saving lots of per-process private memory

• Fix backspacing problem for non-Latin languages
• Perfectly text-extractable PDFs using pangocairo
• Allow loading fonts from a font file and use it with Pango

For Admins

Pessulus Lockdown Editor

• Integrate Pessulus into Sabayon source tree

• Support for pluggable lockdown addons for applications (Need volunteer)

Sabayon User Profile Manager

• Syslog logging for sabayon-apply
• Lockdown support for Evolution and Gaim
• Improved user interface

For Everyone

Documentation

• Documentation editor for Project Mallard (SoC Project 2007)

Infrastructure

• Upgrade servers to RHEL5 update1
• Upgrade last server (menubar) to RHEL5
• Use RAID1 and upgrade HDDs on buildbot master
• Setup new GNOME website on GNOME servers
• Upgrade GNOME Bugzilla to 3.0 (while keeping all customizations not yet upstreamed)
• Upgrade svn.gnome.org to SVN 1.4+ and setup readonly SVN mirror on a container

• Make use of 'configuration management software', see this overview (Currently looking at puppet)

• Complete move of sysadmin.gnome.org content to the wiki.
• Document everything; policies, servers, etc
• Switch from RT3 to Bugzilla
• Setup slave DNS server on socket
• Upgrade socket,progress to new Ubuntu LTS (if LTS is out before 2.22)

Library.gnome.org

• Implement search engine
  • API lookup
  • Local search engine, language-aware, only indexing recent documentation
• Implement support for annotations
• PDF output
• Improved gtk-doc transformation (cross links, output style)

• Support for unstable API references via BuildBot

• Automatic tool to report a bug when docs can't be built

Proposed modules

Keep in mind that there's no guarantee that the proposed modules will actually be integrated into GNOME.

• Anjuta DevStudio: an integrated development environment for GNOME.

• Empathy: a rich set of reusable instant messaging widgets, and a GNOME client using those widgets.

• Cheese: a photobooth-inspired GNOME application for taking pictures and videos from a webcam.

• Gimmie: a tab-like replacement for the main Panel menubar, providing logical access to the concepts of the desktop.

• Vinagre: a VNC client for GNOME.

• Mouse Tweaks: a set of special accessibility enhancements to controlling the mouse cursor.

• GtkGLExt: an OpenGL extension to GTK+ 2.0.

GNOME 2.20

For Users

Deskbar Applet

• Major refactoring (SoC Project 2007)

  • D-Bus API to access deskbar functionalities
  • Object (i.e. files, persons, etc) actions (open, send to for a file, call, chat, send email, view vcard for a contact)

Epiphany Web Browser

• Better inline completion of URLs entered in the address bar
• Printing improvements (support for frames, a progress window)
• Better use of icons in the user interface, also accessibility-related
• Smooth scrolling can be enabled from the Preferences
• Other minor improvements

Evince Document Viewer

• Forms support (SoC Project 2006)

• Printing multiple pages per sheet
• Persistent print settings
• Use cairo in the view

Evolution Groupware

• Improved SPAM filtering with plugable junk filters
• Backup restore support
• Improved e-mail notification
• Improved Gtk+ Printing support for mails
• System Timezone Integration
• Attachment reminder for message composer
• Evolution Exchange
  • Better offline support
  • Improved message loading
  • Lots of Performance improvements
  • Delegation support

Eye of GNOME Image Viewer

• Editable toolbar
• Plugin system
• Support for XMP metadata
• UI improvements
  • Image collection pane
  • Image properties dialog
  • Preferences dialog
  • Error/warning feedback

File Roller Archive Manager

• Load and save remote archives
• Extract archive to a remote locations
• DnD and Copy/Paste among File Roller windows
• Pathbar instead of the locationbar

Gedit Text Editor

• Migration to GtkSourceView 2 which features a new and improved highlighting engine

GNOME Control Center

• Merge Themes, Fonts, Background, UI into an Appearance configuration applet

GNOME Display Manager (GDM)

• Support for Linux auditing.
• Better utmp/wtmp support.
• RBAC (Role Based Access Control) support for Shutdown, Reboot, and Suspend.
• UI improvements (e.g. addition of background tag to gdmgreeter theme XML files).
• Accessibility improvements.

GNOME Keyring

• Proper integration with PAM so another keyring password prompt is not necessary
• Use of non-pageable memory for sensitive data and secrets
• Ability to store keyrings on removable media.
• Integration with power management to discard all sensitive memory before sleeping or hibernating

GNOME Magnifier

• Isolate the X11 dependency
• Improved magnifier compositor performance
• New applet to apply colorblind filters

GNOME Panel

• Fix positioning of panels when the screen size changes
• Sort windows by workspace in the Window List applet

GNOME Power Manager

• Per-battery profiling
• Improved statistics interface that provide more details and key value outputs

• Full compliance with FreeDesktop.org power management specification

GNOME System Tools

• WPA support for network-admin
• Password for SMB shares in shares-admin
• Bookeeping added NTP servers
• Better network locations integration

GNOME Themes

• New Inverted metacity theme
• Updated Clearlooks and Glossy Metacity themes

GNOME Utils

• Show more details for each file system in Baobab
• Perform a look up for similar words for each query in Dictionary
• Use case insensitive search when finding words in a Dictionary definition

GNOME On-screen Keyboard

• Fix remaining hardware issues related to use of FreeDesktop.org's XEvIE.

Libwnck

• Better integration with Compiz and other window managers
• DnD in the window list to reorganize how windows are sorted

Metacity Window Manager

• Better RTL languages support

Orca

• Improved access to Firefox and Thunderbird
• Several fixes for i18n/l10n-related issues
• Better support for multilingual text

Seahorse Encryption Keys Manager

• Complete implementation of missing GNOME Keyring Manager features
  • Change master password
• Better Evolution integration

  • Make evolution use libcryptui widgets and D-Bus method calls (SoC Project 2007)

  • e-d-s integration, auto-contact creation, photo ID synchronization
• Themable application specific icons

Tomboy Notes

• Support notes synchronization across multiple machines

Yelp Help Viewer

• Replace Scrollkeeper with (backwards compatible) new desktop-agnostic library

Zenity

• Timeout for dialogs

For Developers

AtSpi

• Support for Python

Epiphany

• Experimental WebKit backend

GLib

• Support for FreeDesktop.org's xdg-user-dirs

GTK+

This is a small selection from the improvements in the upcoming GTK+ 2.12. For more detailed information please refer to the GTK+ 2.11.x release annoucement or the GTK+ ChangeLog for even greater detail.

• GtkBuilder (a replacement of libglade)

• Support for widget offscreen rendering
• New Tap-n-Hold API
• New Tooltips API
  • Allows complex tooltips (markup, images)
  • Tooltips on insensitive widgets
  • Tooltips on treeviews, etc.

• GtkFileChooser updates

  • Improved file chooser dialog size logic
  • New search mode with backends for Beagle, Tracker and simple search
  • New recent files support
• New Input Methods
  • Thai and Lao
  • Multipress input method for phone pads
• Builtin stock icons replaced with a new set of Tango-compatible icons
• GDK updates
  • New API for changing startup notification id on a window
  • New API for sending startup notification messages
  • New GDK threads API to allow fully thread-safe handling of idles and timeouts

  • Better support for compositing in GdkWindow

• Keyboard navigation improvements
  • Infrastructure for notification of failed keyboard navigation
  • Better support for restricted sets of keys

• GtkScaleButton, GtkVolumeButton: new widgets for volume controls frequently seen in multimedia applications

• Printing support updates
  • Support half-open ranges
  • New API for listing paper sizes and (de)serializing page setups and print settings
• Recent Files API updates

  • Support for custom menu items in GtkRecentChooserMenu

  • New GtkRecentAction

• GtkRange updates

  • Support for fill levels

• GtkEntry updates

  • Inline-selection mode for entry completion (closer to what web browsers need)
  • Added gtk_entry_set_cursor_hadjustment() to support automatic scrolling

• GtkStatusIcon updates

  • Multiscreen support
  • Don't take up space when invisible

• GtkCellRendererProgress updates

  • The progress bar is now drawn using the theme engine
  • Support activity mode

• GtkNotebook updates

  • Support scrolling during tab DnD
  • Allow dropping tabs anywhere
  • Deprecate numeric group-ids in favour of a more flexible group property

• GtkTreeView updates

  • Lots of scrolling fixes
• Many improvements to Windows and OS X ports

Glade

• Several improvements/added functionality in the user interface
• Support for developers to add context-menu actions for their custom widgets

Gail

• Move part of gail into libgnomecanvas

Pango

• Improved OpenType Layout engine.

• Add support for specifying multiple preferred languages.
• Vertical text shaping now uses vertical variants of punctuation marks.
• New shaping engine for minority language N'Ko.
• Various new pangocairo APIs, making for a tighter integration with cairo.

For Admins

Sabayon User Profile Manager

• Support for OpenOffice.org lockdown

• New logging facility for debugging
• Many robustness-related fixes

For Everyone

Infrastructure

• Install alpha quality version of library.gnome.org on some server
• Setup new GNOME website on GNOME servers
• Upgrade servers from RHEL3/4 to RHEL5
• Move GNOME buildbot master to GNOME servers

• Better mango software (SoC Project 2007)

Library.gnome.org

• Improved look'n'feel that matches new GNOME website design
• Separated user/dev/admin docs
• Added support for development versions and out-of-GNOME documents
• Google site search and API lookup form

Proposed modules

Keep in mind that there's no guarantee that the proposed modules will actually be integrated into GNOME.

• LSR: an extensible assistive technology for the GNOME desktop.

• GNOME Devel Docs: a set of docs for GNOME developers.

• Accerciser: an interactive Python accessibility explorer for the GNOME desktop.