Package: gnome-core Version: 1:3.30+1 Severity: serious Justification: we should make a decision one way or another before release
I recently changed gnome-core to install gnome-flashback instead of GNOME Shell on s390x, because: GNOME Shell is uninstallable on s390x, due to mozjs60 not being functional there; testing migration requires task packages to be installable; and the release team were not willing to waive that requirement for s390x, because d-i maintainers were concerned that d-i might do the wrong thing if asked to install an uninstallable task. However, the observant will realise that gnome-flashback is not the package I meant. I should have added a dependency on gnome-session-flashback (a complete GNOME-2-derived desktop with a panel and a window manager), not on gnome-flashback (a helper for gnome-session-flashback that doesn't do anything particularly useful on its own). (I only found this out because I happened to have tried installing GNOME Flashback on a test VM while trying to reproduce an unrelated bug.) It gets worse: gnome-session-flashback requires gnome-panel, which is unbuildable on s390x, because it build-depends on gdm. This can be worked around with a sufficiently horrible hack (see below), but I can't help questioning whether we should. Note that I can't actually test any of this, because (real or virtual) s390x machines normally don't have any displays, and after spending a significant amount of time setting up a s390x qemu virtual machine I was unable to get XDMCP forwarding to work. If there are people who care about graphics on s390x machines, perhaps they can explain how? By this point I feel as though I have already put orders of magnitude more time and effort into GNOME on s390x than it deserves: GNOME is a desktop environment, designed to be run on desktops and laptops, not on $15K mainframes with no displays. In particular, I cannot justify putting time and effort into fixing the remaining failing tests in mozjs60 (although s390x porters and JavaScript enthusiasts are of course welcome to do so, and I'm happy to point people in the right directions to avoid duplicate work). Options are: * Deliberately stop trying to install a full desktop environment on s390x: make gnome-core stop depending on lightdm, gnome-session, gnome-shell or gnome-shell-extensions on s390x, with no replacement. This would effectively mean that gnome-core means "the core GNOME apps, but no desktop environment" on s390x, and "the core GNOME desktop" everywhere else. * Hack gnome-panel to build successfully on s390x, for example with <https://salsa.debian.org/gnome-team/gnome-panel/merge_requests/1>, and apply s/gnome-flashback/gnome-session-flashback/ to the gnome-core dependencies. This might need extra work if gnome-panel is not the only missing package. * Close this bug and leave gnome-core as-is. I suspect that no end user will report a bug about its current broken state on s390x for the entire lifetime of buster, at which point we can use this as evidence that nobody actually wants desktop tasks on mainframes. (I am not entirely serious about this being an option, but not entirely joking either.) Does anyone have any input on this? smcv
