[Desktop12.04-Topic] GNOME Version for the LTS

[Jeremy Bicha]

On 13 October 2011 04:49, Sebastien Bacher <seb128 at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> So when I wrote "easy" it was rather "obvious topic for UDS", the choice
> is not that easy and I would like everybody to think on going for GNOME
> 3.2 or 3.4 will impact on what they are doing, keeping in mind that our
> first goal for the LTS is quality.
>
> Now there are good reasons for going for GNOME 3.4
>
> - GNOME 3.2 is still early in the 3 serie and still has issues, they
> will keep improving this cycle and some of the improvements would be
> good to have
>
> - we like to have at least an uptodate platform for a lts (i.e glib,
> gtk), out of the fact that glib itself is the issue this time
>
> - some users will want GNOME 3.4

Hi, I've got a strong opinion on this: I'm very skeptical about
staying with GNOME 3.2. I don't think GNOME 3.2 is exceptionally
stable or high quality, or that 3.4 will be exceptionally buggy. My
blind guess is that 3.4 will generally have less bugs than 3.2 as 3.2
was the first release to build upon the GNOME 3 transition. Only this
fall will Debian, Ubuntu, and openSUSE users get GNOME 3 so several
bugs haven't even been reported yet (and some bugs won't be fixed in a
.1 or .2 update anyway). It would have been foolish to ship KDE 4.1 in
two Kubuntu releases in a row for stability purposes. I believe this
would be unprecedented for Ubuntu to skip packaging the latest and
greatest stable GNOME (except for last spring which was a completely
different situation).

There's a vocal segment of the open source community who believe
Canonical is forcing Unity on them and doing a terrible job at making
GNOME available. Regardless of the (in)accuracy of that belief,
deciding to stick with GNOME 3.2 will be a PR hit and we need to have
a very easy-to-understand reason for that decision if it's necessary.
I don't think GNOME developers would be very happy with the decision
either and it's good to keep upstream as happy as possible.... :-)

> - if we don't go for GNOME 3.4 it's likely the new version will be
> packaged in a ppa as GNOME3 was for natty, that's ok but if we do it
> because we think glib is going to create issues it's really suboptimal
> to let a ppa ship a new version of glib

The GNOME 3 PPA on Natty was honestly sort of horrible. Not to say
that it didn't have benefits: I used it and for me and others it was
quite nice to have. It was also good in encouraging new contributors
to volunteer. And I am appreciative of the work it took to produce the
PPA (which of course also really helped our GNOME 3 transition early
in the Oneiric cycle). But it broke the normal Ubuntu desktop in quite
a few unavoidable ways.

Jeremy Bicha