GUADEC Report and Dan Yeaw on Python in GNOME
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Report from the annual general meeting at GUADEC
At GUADEC in Denver, Colorado on July 21, the GNOME Foundation held its annual general meeting (AGM) to provide updates from the foundation's board and committees. Topics included work accomplished in the past year, challenges facing the GNOME Foundation–including fundraising and finding a new executive director–and some insight into plans for the next year. And last, but not least, the awarding of the Pants of Thanks.
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The session started with a number of preliminary remarks by board president Robert McQueen, noting new officers for the 2024-2025 fiscal year and thanking committees for their work. One of the first orders of business after that was to address the departure of executive director Holly Million, who was hired by the foundation last October. Million has been replaced by Richard Littauer, who had previously applied for the position, as an interim executive director.
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Showing up for Python in GNOME
A few years ago, PyGObject—the Python package that provides bindings for GTK and GNOME applications—was not faring particularly well. Several maintainers had left the project and its development was not keeping pace with changes in GTK. At this year's GUADEC, Dan Yeaw presented a talk about the project's decline, improvements in the last year, and his experience getting involved in an undermaintained project.
Yeaw said that he worked for Ford Motor Company in functional safety, and part of his job was to do systems modeling to help ensure that "complex systems don't malfunction and cause harm". He wanted to be able to do that with open-source software, which led him to a project called Gaphor, a modeling application written in Python, about six years ago. From there, he got involved in the Python community and helping to "fix pain points" he encountered running Gaphor on Windows. In the past year, he had started contributing to PyGObjects.