[Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review

[Michael Terry]

I'm a fan of this for quality reasons.

Shipping very latest GNOME used to give Ubuntu a cutting edge feel, but 
nowadays, shiny new Ubuntu features tend to come from Unity and 
friends.  The interesting new user-facing changes that GNOME brings are 
(mostly) in Shell.  So I don't think the default Ubuntu image would lose 
much in terms of "staying relevant" by sticking to stable GNOME releases.

That said, the GNOME Remix would have a much harder time feeling cutting 
edge.

-mt

On 15/10/12 13:50, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> Hey,
>
> That's a "classic", we usually review our plans for GNOME for the next 
> cycle.
>
> 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):
>
> - tracking unstable GNOME is taking lot of resources that we don't 
> invest in our desktop (packaging a new stack every 3 weeks, dealing 
> with transitions, regressions, etc)
>
> - our desktop is quite less "stock GNOME" than it used to be, which 
> means we have extra integration work to do and it's less trivial to do 
> those "on the way" during the cycle
>
> - GNOME unstable series and Ubuntu "working every day" are hard to 
> conciliate goals
>
> - 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
>
> - 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
>
> - we don't get early feedback on what is happening
>
> - the new version of libraries might have APIs our app writers might 
> want to use
>
>
> Comments?
>
> Seb
>