It's Official: GNOME 3.0 In September 2010

Last week we were the first to report that it looked like GNOME 3.0 would not come until September 2010 after developers wanted a delay compared to their original March 2010 plans. As of last night it's now official that GNOME 3.0 will not be out until September of next year.

The GNOME release team has decided (and then announced) that GNOME 3.0 will come in September. GNOME 2.30 will still happen in March and will feature the GNOME 3.0 packages that are ready in time, while September will be the first full-blown release of this overhauled desktop environment. GNOME 2.30 is still being considered a stable desktop release.

This delay will allow GNOME 3.0 to be more polished and stable in time for Ubuntu 10.10, Fedora 14, and other distributions coming out with new updates in the fourth quarter of 2010.

The release team also announced their decisions regarding new modules for GNOME 2.30. The surprise from this module information is that the Clutter tool-kit is being blocked from becoming a GNOME module with the 2.30 release. Currently, Intel's requiring a copyright assignment be made, which the GNOME developers are trying to avoid (though it should not be much of an issue if Intel was to grant permission to the GNOME Foundation), but as with all US legal matters, this will take a while to resolve. Until then, this tool-kit used by GNOME Games and Mutter and Moblin is out.

What has been accepted into the GNOME 2.30 desktop module list is gnome-packagekit and nautilus-sendto, while gmime, libdb, and vala are being approved as external dependencies. GNOME Tracker 0.7 has also been approved as an external dependency until more work is done in making Tracker useful to desktop users. GNOME dconf was also approved as an external dependency and for GNOME 3.0 it is already pre-approved to enter their core module set. The dconf module is a new low-level configuration system.