We want to share some updates and future plans from the GNOME Circle Committee with you. The Circle Committee is responsible for reviewing and accepting apps and other components into GNOME Circle as well as maintaining the review criteria .

The biggest issue for us, and for maintainers who submitted apps, has been the considerable backlog of unreviewed apps. There are cases where apps have been waiting for feedback for years. We are very sorry for those who have been affected by this. We are trying to finally address this issue now.

AI Policy

As a precaution, we have adopted the AI policy that already applies to GNOME Shell extensions. With the rise of low-quality machine-generated software, there is a risk that GNOME Circle could be overwhelmed by new submissions of this nature, further clogging the review queue.

This policy is a starting point, and for now, it will only be enforced on new submissions. We are open to receiving feedback on the AI policy from existing Circle maintainers. In a quick survey, 62% of Circle maintainers reported not using LLMs at all, 34% reported using them for small questions or snippets, and only 3% are taking larger parts of code from them. No maintainer selected the option for no longer writing code themselves.

Meanwhile, Flathub has also tightened their AI policy. Since GNOME Circle apps are usually expected to be published on Flathub, this policy indirectly applies as well.

Closing New Submissions

To make sure that we are focusing on submissions that haven’t been addressed for a long time, we will stop accepting new submissions for now. We will reopen submissions when we have made a considerable dent in our backlog.

New Handling of Issues

This is mostly a technical detail, but from now on, we will close issues that are awaiting feedback from the maintainer. When providing an answer, maintainers should just reopen the issue. This gives us a better overview of which issues are awaiting further processing by us.

Early Reminder About the Use of Outdated SDKs

Every GNOME release cycle, we spend a considerable amount of time on getting GNOME Circle apps to update their SDK on Flathub before the SDK becomes unmaintained. To avoid this in the future, we will try something new: We will remind maintainers much earlier that they are using an outdated SDK – months before it reaches EOL, rather than just a few weeks. This means apps using the GNOME 49 SDK will soon be part of an automatically generated reminder issue. To get the reminder, please make sure that you have provided a GNOME GitLab account in your project’s .doap file.

Growing Benefits

We are steadily growing the benefits for GNOME Circle apps and their maintainers. Among the benefits that were added are:

• Having a student work on your project for Google Summer of Code or Outreachy.
• Hosting your help pages on help.gnome.org .
• Getting a tag for your project on GNOME’s Discourse .

Of course, all contributors and maintainers of GNOME Circle projects are still eligible for GNOME Foundation membership. You can check our full list of benefits .

Call for Reviewers

We are in constant need of more reviewers in the Circle Committee. If you have already reached out to us, and we haven’t gotten back to you, please give it another shot. You can find us in #circle:gnome.org .