The way to GNOME 3 and the future
by AndreKlapper
After some comments and criticism on the future of GNOME in 2008, the GNOME release team published a plan in April 2009 to trigger discussions in the community. New approaches were developed and GNOME Shell arose as the new default user interface of GNOME, influenced by new smaller device types and contrary to the classical panel design that had been dominant for the last fifteen years in most computer interfaces.
Originally September 2010 was targeted for the 3.0 release, but after receiving feedback from several teams in GNOME the release team decided to add another six months in order to bring the product to perfection. At the end of March 2011 members of the marketing team, design team, release team and distributions met at the GNOME 3.0 Hackfest in Bengaluru (India) to prepare the 3.0 release. As planned the release took place on April 6th, 2011. GNOME's community celebrated over 80 parties all over the world.
GNOME 3 introduced a new user experience. It provides a task-oriented and less disruptive workflow and is guided by design. While the philosophy to keep things simply remains, GNOME is not a patchwork of modules anymore but targets good interaction between integrated parts of the system.
On the way to GNOME 3 many old system libraries were replaced by modern and better integrated technology. This makes the GNOME platform more attractive and easier to use for developers.
The libraries and applications of GNOME were traditionally organized in several so-called modulesets. These got reorganized for GNOME 3 in order to define a clear core of underlying technology bits and unbranded core applications, and to provide space for excellent applications that formally do not need a blessing anymore to be official part of GNOME. The traditional and well-received six months release cycles were kept for GNOME 3, but instead of a proposal period for packages to be officially included in GNOME, a proposal period for features was introduced to put focus on system-wide functionality and usability instead of technical implementation details like modules. The feature proposal concept helps with project wide release planning and keeping a long term view instead of focussing only on the next release and on specific modules.
After the release of GNOME 3.0 Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias, Colin Walters, Javier Jardón and Luca Ferretti joined the GNOME release team. Karsten Bräckelmann, Frédéric Crozat, Lucas Rocha and Vincent Untz left after many years of hard work.
In late 2011 it was discussed and decided to merge the several different freezes in GNOME's development schedule in order to simplify it. Since 3.4 the API Freeze, UI Freeze and Feature Freeze happen at the same time, making it easier for developers to follow.