Preserving the rather large CC list for now… On Thu, Jun 20, 2019 at 06:05:22AM -0400, Sam Hartman wrote:
I feel very uncomfortable with a change as big as this revert happening this late in the release cycle.
How big is big? The MR I raised resurrects a patch that changes one line of code, and was shipped in the last stable release. Although it looks like further work is needed to make the change as smooth as possible so this would grow. However, the patch certainly needs more testing. Is the issue that it results in a large change in terms of what software is executed by the user as a consequence, and what of that has been tested thus far in the freeze? How late is late? How would you have felt about it back in early April, when I first raised it? I was surprised to discover it then, and I felt it was late in the cycle even then. But mostly whats happened since is nothing. I absolutely do not blame the GNOME team here. Simon McVittie and Michael Biebl in particular have taken risks sticking their heads above the parapet to engage with me on this matter, and both have made it clear that it would be unreasonable for them to make the call given their respective levels of involvement. I respect that, and I am extremely grateful for them engaging with the issue. The others are either too busy or have taken a decision not to engage with a potentially toxic issue, and I respect that, too: we are all volunteers who have to make our own choices about what we are prepared to do and engage in. Besides, like many teams, the GNOME team is clearly under-resourced. I am a *little* disappointed that this does not seem to have been thought of as an important, project-wide issue. Regardless of whether one uses GNOME or Wayland oneself, the matter of the default desktop for the distribution we are all working to produce, and the experience that our users will get out of the box, I would have thought was important for all of us. It reinforces the idea, to me, that we are largely working in our own silos, and not concerned (enough) about the holistic distribution as a whole.
And yet, the lack of a clear reconfirmation in this time line even given the wonderfully civil discussion is telling.
I'm very pleased that the discussion has come across as civil. I've tried really hard from my end to achieve that, I know that issues around GNOME can result in some very toxic communications.
My proposal--which again I have no power to implement--is that we go forward with the current default. However, we remain open to a revert in the first couple of buster point releases.
There are caveats with switching the default in either direction. Let's say we go with Wayland now, and later decide to switch as per the
criteria/process you sketch below. • users of the default, who got Wayland from Buster onwards and had no problems, would subsequently find themselves switched to Xorg by stable-updates, which IMHO would be unexpected (if noticed) and contrary to the expectations of a stable release. • A user who installed or upgraded and got Wayland by default but had problems, would have likely addressed them by switching to the Xorg session explicitly (assuming they could figure out that doing so mitigated their issues). Changing the default would only prevent *future* users from hitting the same problems.
The criteria for that revert should be based on the actual severity and frequence of problems our users run into, but should specifically exclude the blanket reluctance to make a change like that in a point release. We would still need adequate testing of such a revert.
My concern with this is it's a new set of policies and procedures, not codified anywhere, with a lot of detail to work out "on the hoof" (how do we measure frequency of problems? do we go with the existing bug severity guidelines? How much is adequate testing? etc.) So combined with the user experience above, I think we would be best not to change the default within a stable release cycle, unless there was some kind of enormous catastrophic issue with Wayland that we don't know about yet, and that's unlikely. I still argue that the traditional Debian conservative, when-its-ready approach would be the distribution status quo (Xorg), but I recognise the concerns about the proposed patch, further work needed, lack of testing etc.; and those are not issues I think I can resolve alone. -- Jonathan Dowland
