Hello folks, I wanted to answer a few questions that folks have posed on the list. Am currently leading the Mono effort at Novell, but I happen to be on the same building where some of the desktop/Gnome guys live. You should not consider this email as authoritative, because I am not directly involved in the desktop group, but I share lunch with the guys and the usability lab is next to my office, so I tend to talk to them. So with this in mind: * Ximian and Gnome The Ximian group has not existed for a long time, it was split into various groups after the Novell acquisition, and they have merged, transformed and shifted into various areas. In the engineering area some guys went into ZenWorks management (the Red Carpet guys), some went to the desktop effort and some are part of Mono. In particular, I would like to point out that the effort is not really aimed at "Gnome" per se, but at the "Desktop". That is the important end goal, Gnome is merely one of the components of the desktop. * Gnome version number 2.14 My impression is that the latest Gnome froze too late in the schedule for it to be incorporated into our SUSE distribution. I know that some of the important features and fixes in 2.14 were backported earlier to our version of 2.12 because we knew the dates would not work for us. I know that the Desktop Group is working towards polishing, fixing, improving and tuning what will be the next enterprise product SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) which is a product that we have to maintain for a number of years (5, 7, I cant remember). So the focus has been in making sure that we do the best possible job for this distribution that we will be supporting for a very long time. As someone has pointed out on the list elsewhere, am sure that 2.14 will make it into the next iteration of OpenSUSE; But the team managing that is currently crossing all the t's and dotting all the i's to make sure SLED is as good as everyone hopes it will be. * The Desktop Group In general, the Desktop Group works on various areas: they do develop new software (Xgl, beagle, the new slab, open office macro support, F-Spot, Banshee, compiz) and they do extend and contribute to existing software extensively. We believe that a complete desktop is much more than just Gnome. The team is trying to put together a very comprehensive, and in my opinion, the most ambitious desktop release of a Linux desktop ever created. You might not see them actively posting on the list, but they are there, and if you are interested particularly on the Gnome angle, you can track some of their progress on a number of aggregators (Planet Gnome and Monologue come to mind) as well as the multitude of irc channels in irc.gnome.org devoted to specific projects (#banshee, #ipodsharp, #f-spot, #dashboard used for Beagle). Someone pointed out that I was in charge of Gnome; I am not directly involved in Gnome anymore. I work on Mono, and we work on Gtk# and developer tools like MonoDevelop which are only indirectly related to Gnome. * Mailing lists I only found out today about this mailing list, am sure other guys are in the same boat. Some of the developers read this list, some do not. I do not know if there is a policy about this, and if there is, I do not know what it is. I know that on my team (Mono) I ask my developers to track 3 or 4 mailing lists, and I ask specific individuals to also watch a few more specific lists (for example, some of them have to participate in the ECMA process, some of them have to monitor reported bugs and QA them). Maybe my group needs to pay more attention to the OpenSUSE list; I will certainly keep an eye for Mono-related issues on the list myself. Hope this clarifies some of the questions on the list, Miguel.