Gusions Blog

Ieri segnalavo bug su docky (si è un bel passatempo lo ammetto :O ) ed ho avuto il piacere di “conoscere” Jason Smith. “Chi è costui?!” Tu lettore starai pensando ( e se non lo stai facendo dopo avere letto questo lo farai ), Jason Smith è un alieno. È risaputo che venga da marte, dato che è riuscito a creare gnome-do e docky

Essendomi appassionato a docky (mea culpa), ho deciso di chiedere una breve intervista, che vi posto:

Hi Jason i’m very happy to interview you… Can you replay a my
questions?

1.Tell us about yourself.

I am a 22 year old college student out of Western Michigan University. I
have been doing software for about 6 years and open source development
for about 4 of them. My early involvements were with the Beryl project
from which I moved on to GNOME Do and Docky.

2.Tell us how docky born and how it split from the gnome-do project

Docky was born out of the need for a class project actually. I needed to
write some form of largish application for a class and Docky sounded
like a fun idea. By the end of course it was far beyond what the course
required but it certainly was a fun demo at the end of the semester. We
actually went from nothing to Docky 1.0 in about 3 months!

Over time Docky has amassed a sizable code base and began to account for
nearly half the code in GNOME Do proper. Quickly GNOME Do was becoming
secondary to Docky and making both projects difficult to maintain.
Honestly I think we all would have gone insane if we hadn’t finally
split the projects.

3.What are the future plains for docky?

Docky will continue development of course. It has slowed a little bit
recently as the personal lives of its primary developers have needed
some love. I have started a new career with Canonical, Robert has needed
time to focus on his thesis, and poor Chris has been left all alone.
We’ll rescue him soon though!

In the future you can expect to see a lot of polish put into Docky and
better integration with the window manager. Currently Docky kind of tip
toes around the window manager to get things done, in the future I would
like to see it taking a more active role and really being a part of that
window management world. This is all waiting on some technology advances
in the linux desktop however so it could be a little bit.

4.Docky in my opinion is the best dockbar in the gnu/linux world, when
you can improove docky?

I will have more time to work on Docky in the summer of 2010. As a
college student this time of the year is VERY busy for me, racing around
for senior project deadlines, and work deadlines, I often find myself
with hardly enough time to eat, much less work on Docky. I kind of
regret the way that has turned out, but I don’t get paid to work on
Docky so it always plays second fiddle to things that do get me paid.

5.In which part do you want to improve Docky?

Docky is largely monolithic right now, I would love to see Docky
becoming more modular, spawning libraries that other application authors
may find useful.

6.At the moment we have eleven helpers.
Are you planning to create many helpers?

Actually the helpers are growing faster than I tend to keep up with
them. I only wrote 2 or 3 of them personally, the rest have come from
the other team members. I am happy to see the idea is taking off however
and I think a lot more will be produced in the future.

Are you going to create an easy helpers creator?

We intend to release a library to make helper creation easier yes.

7.When we have the stable version of docky?

This has been a giant thorn in my side. I have to admit, I am a better
coder than I am a release manager and packager. This is an area where we
really need some help. A person who can come in and really just serve as
a release manager instead of a coder. That would be awesome! So many
times the code has hit a releasable condition, but then some new feature
will come in and screw that up. We should have released but we keep
finding ourselves waiting for the next big thing to land. It is a real
problem. If I had to speculate I say it all grows from the fact that we
write Docky because we like writing Docky, not because we really want
attention or even care all that much who else uses it. We just like
writing the code.

8.For me, what distro you are using?

Ubuntu 9.10 and Ubuntu 10.04

9.When you will open the docky’s website?

When we find someone to help us make it! Making websites requires skill
with image editors and artistic talent. Things our team development team
really lacks. We have a wiki up, but as a coder I can’t really do much
better than that without outside help.

Cercasi volontario per la traduzione italiana.

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