On 15 October 2012 13:50, Sebastien Bacher <[email protected]> wrote: > That's going to be a controversial topic but I want to suggest we stay on > stable GNOME this cycle, the reasons are (in random order):
Well you've been following GNOME development for longer than many of us. What is it that's making GNOME 3 releases more unstable than GNOME used to be? Is it just that GNOME development has sped up and the developers don't care enough about API stability? > - GNOME is not communicating early enough on what is coming for us to > discuss next cycle at UDS (see nautilus 3.6 in quantal) > > - GNOME is shipping stables with transitions half done (see gstreamer 1.0 > this cycle) which is not something we want in Ubuntu The other big example this cycle is ibus. GNOME 3.6 doesn't work properly without a not-released-as-stable version of ibus. http://pad.lv/1045914 > - our "feedback loop" with GNOME is not really working nowadays, they don't > have time to look at most bugs and we hit regressions and sit on them until > somebody on our side has time to look at them, which means neither GNOME or > us benefits much from tracking unstable GNOME... > > > On the con side though: > > - it gives us less opportunity to work with upstream on resolving issues This will hurt GNOME some too as a decent amount of issues are reported first on Ubuntu. This will send some sort of message to GNOME but I'm not sure that there's much of a conversation happening though. In general, I think it would be a bad idea if we completely and permanently switched to shipping the old stable release instead of the latest stable release and the bug disconnect is one reason. >From the way I see things, GNOME doesn't really support their stable releases much either. The final point release is only two months after the .0 release. > - the new version of libraries might have APIs our app writers might want to > use While maintaining the GTK milestones is a headache, it would also be a headache not to have them in Ubuntu. I don't think this strategy will really save much work. The GNOME milestone releases are likely to be packaged in a PPA any way. On the other hand, I got involved on the Desktop team because there was packaging work that needed to be done and the GNOME3 PPA made it seem like less of a hurdle to contribute to. I think most GNOME apps shouldn't cause any issues for the Ubuntu desktop. There are about 2 weeks from Alpha2 to Feature Freeze, and Alpha 2 approximately corresponds with the 3.7.5 release. By then, it should be clear which apps could cause problems and there is time to get the safe ones in. > One element to think about also is how that would impact the GNOME remix if > the plan there is not ship the latest GNOME... Seb, I blame the remix idea on you. ;) Anyway, if the GNOME remix becomes an official flavor, I was hoping to then ask for permission to include the GNOME3 PPA due to our unique overlap with the flagship Ubuntu release. It's still a bit of a handicap as I don't think we could gain that trust if we included things that regressed Unity. If we don't fork ubuntu-control-center and ubuntu-settings-daemon off from gnome-control-center, then I don't believe it will be possible to ship GNOME Shell 3.7/3.8 next cycle. The last two cycles we've shipped the latest GNOME Shell but with bugs due to incomplete g-c-c/g-s-d support in Ubuntu (for 12.04 it was http://pad.lv/965921 with keyboard shortcuts not able to be configured from System Settings and for 12.10 it was 1045914 with a missing keyboard layout status menu). It's a reasonable guess that for 3.8, the GNOME developers will move aggressively to kill fallback mode and make optimizations and GNOME Shell will depend on those newer optimizations. A big reason for the GNOME remix is to show that you can contribute to GNOME from Ubuntu. I worry about what happens when most users are using a different distro than most developers. Shipping an outdated GNOME means that we have a much less compelling story to tell these developers. Jeremy -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
