[Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review

[Robert Ancell]

On 16/10/12 22:36, Iain Lane wrote:
> Given the way that both projects are now design led, and the fact that
> it's design decisions / philosophies that are driving many of these
> difficulties, it would seem prudent for the respective design teams to
> try to work together a bit more closely. I wonder if we can facilitate
> something here, either at UDS depending on the people there or
> elsewhere.
It would be good to keep communication lines open here. I don't think
there's going to be any meaningful Unity influence on GNOME as their
focus is on things working with GNOME but we need to make sure that
GNOME apps can work effectively in Ubuntu by making Unity handle them
correctly. In terms of Ubuntu Design wanting to modify GNOME packages we
do have to go to GNOME first as it's unsustainable to make the changes
with Ubuntu engineering and then expect them to go upstream easily.
> Back to the initial proposal quoted above. My initial reaction was that
> I disliked it because my philosophy that I generally prefer to work as
> close to upstreams as possible so that we can have a more productive
> feedback loop when it comes to bugs and features. But it seems that
> perhaps this is slightly broken for us, so neither party is getting much
> benefit out of it. A benefit would be that tracking stable series lets
> us work more closely with our other big upstream, Debian. We might be
> able to reduce our deltas there quite a lot if we're tracking the same
> stuff.
I really question the idea that Debian is an upstream to us in the
traditional sense. I see Debian as more of a "sidestream" project that
we can transfer work between.

Things that I think are bad about our close dependency on Debian:
- We have wildly different release schedules and quality standards which
means packages are constantly diverging
- By updating packages in Debian and waiting for them to flow down to
Ubuntu kills our velocity. It can change the time from upstream release
to being in Ubuntu from hours (which is too long in my opinion) to days.
- Debian carries a number of patches that have no relevance to Ubuntu
(e.g. Hurd patches). This just complicates the packaging.
- By leaving some packages to be fully maintained by Debian we easily
end up shipping old packages without noticing it. I was quite shocked
when I updated the version tracker [1] how many out of date packages we
ship. If we're going to ship a quality product we really should be more
aware of the code we ship.

I don't think any of the above is likely to change at any point so I
think the best way of reducing the delta is to not have a delta on our
core packages (i.e. don't try and be in sync at all). The current work
to be in sync is not really benefiting us or Debian and the more
important upstream is the software author not Debian.

Where we do need to be in sync:
- Platform behaviour (e.g. library compatibility) so Universe continues
to work (though I hope Universe will disappear at some point nullifying
this).
- Package naming. This is a problem that's getting worse not better with
extras.ubuntu.com and the like.

--Robert

[1] http://people.canonical.com/~platform/desktop/versions.html