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

[Sebastien Bacher]

Le samedi 15 octobre 2011 à 03:10 -0400, Jeremy Bicha a écrit :

> 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. 

Well depends at what components you look at, there is still ongoing
refactoring and rewrites, some components will be stabler, some other
could be not be as stable. 

One of the transitions I listed before was udisk to udisk2 which is a
rewrite. How can we ship a total rewrite (with the corresponding changes
to gvfs, gnome-disk-utility, etc) in a lts without having feedback from
stable users. How do we know it will not screw lvm setups, ntfs access,
or whatever corporate usecase that GNOME unstable series don't get
testing on (corporate tend to run stable versions). What if evolution
switches to webkit next cycle and it doesn't get working great, what is
the gnome-keyring,seahorse refactoring has issues?

> 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.... :-)

Well I'm sure people from RedHat and Suse will understand, those are
both distributions which have corporate users and tend to be
conservative on versions when they roll those. Look also at what
OpenSuse is doing with their 9 month cycles, they basically ship every
second GNOME version...

> in the Oneiric cycle). But it broke the normal Ubuntu desktop in quite
> a few unavoidable ways.

Right, as Michael pointed it though it was rather a lot of changes, I
don't think stayed behind on GNOME 3.4 will have that impact. For one
thing we will want to be conservative for importants infrastructure
bits, not everything, it's likely that the clutter stack and non default
installation packages will be updated. We will likely update vinagre
(which you mentioned in your other email) since that seems something
safe to upgrade in a new serie, we might take the new eog or evince or
gedit the same way. If we look at the picture the ppa if it collects the
bits we are missing should be a pretty small and limited set.

Cheers,
Sebastien Bacher