Staying on GTK/GNOME 3.8 next cycle/for the LTS?

[Sebastien Bacher]

Le 01/10/2013 21:16, Adam Dingle a écrit :
> I've used Ubuntu every day for 7 years and am active in the GNOME
> community.  The fact that Ubuntu lags one release behind GNOME is
> already a significant burden for me.  I often spend time building the
> newest version of GNOME apps, which can be challenging since Ubuntu's
> libraries lag behind.
>
> If Ubuntu stays with 3.8 for Saucy+1 (i.e. starts to lag two releases
> behind GNOME), I'd quite possibly switch to Fedora or Debian.  Staying
> with 3.8 could be fine for most users, especially if Canonical wants
> to focus most of its energy on phones and tablets.  But for anyone who
> wants to use the latest GNOME apps and especially anyone who wants to
> contribute to GNOME development, two releases back is just too much.
>
> adam
>
Hey Adam,

I'm sorry to read that Ubuntu being behind on GNOME releases is a burden 
for you :/

Can I ask if that's the opinion of an user, or from a developer wanting 
to contribute to GNOME? You probably understand that's it's hard for us 
to make both targets happy at the same time, especially in GNOME 
directions is less aligned with Ubuntu's which makes harder to include 
their newer version.

If you want to write code for GNOME trunk, using the GNOME3 ppa/jhbuild 
probably makes sense (or Fedora if that seems a better option for you), 
you are just not on top of our priority list for the next LTS (I hope we 
can get back to a situation that makes GNOME users happier after the LTS 
though).


One of the question we need to answer there, is to know if the 
improvements from GNOME 3.10 are going to be enough benefits, to our 
users, to justify the bugs/stability issues/lack of integration that are 
going to come with the updates? (if we update, that's going to take our 
desktop resources, which means we are not going to be able to do work 
smoothing rough edges).

You probably know of those tradeoffs, since you reported some of the 
nautilus usability issues that came with the GNOME updates and didn't 
get addressed yet...

Looking to some of the notes of GNOME 3.10/the changes listed there:
- better wayland support: that's not going to be ready for the LTS/not 
likely a compelling feature there
- shipping preview of new music/maps/software/photes/chat applications: 
that's orthogonal to this discussion, those are not going to be default 
in the LTS
- some UI improvements to applications: that would be nice to have, 
though that's making most app looks less integrated under Unity, which 
is an issue for us
- improvements to gnome-shell: it would be nice to get in the GNOME 
remix, that's not an argument for our default desktop though
- GTK got some new widgets, and deprecated quite some options ... which 
is going to bring heated discussions our way, would be nice to defer 
those to the next LTS cycle
- gnome-control-center improvements, those make the UI more suitable for 
a mobile environment (and less for a desktop one as a side effect) ... 
you can argue it's a win, it seems not obvious for Unity/desktop though

I'm probably overlooking some of the changes, but it doesn't seem there 
is anything in there that would be so much an improvement for our users 
that it would justify spending our efforts on those updates rather than 
on fixing the usability issues and bugs we already have in our backlog.

It would be useful if you (or some of the others that think that not 
updating would be an error) would give specifics example of what GNOME 
3.10 can bring to our users.

Cheers,
Sebastien Bacher