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

[Adam Dingle]

On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 4:22 PM, Sebastien Bacher <seb128 at ubuntu.com> 
wrote:
> 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?
> 

I'm somewhere between those, but actually more of a user.  In other 
words, I report a lot of bugs and like to comment on the very latest 
features, but don't make many code contributions myself.  There's a 
continuous spectrum from users to power users to developers, and I 
think in a healthy software ecosystem they can all run the same 
codebase.  Suppose that developers are running release A and users are 
all running release B.  The greater the distance in time between A and 
B, the harder it is to get a useful feedback loop from users to 
developers (and vice versa).  I think Ubuntu's lag behind the latest 
GNOME has contributed to the feeling of separation between the Ubuntu 
and GNOME communities, for better or for worse.

>  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).
> 

Right.  I'm not concerned about specific features from GNOME 3.10 as 
much as staying closer to the upstream codebase so that developers and 
users can work together.  I know that the closer you are to upstream, 
the more engineering effort it takes to keep things stable, and that 
has a cost, so of course this depends on Ubuntu (and Canonical's) 
development resources and priorities.

Anyway, I know I may not be a completely typical Ubuntu user.  The 
deeper story here is that it feels like Ubuntu is slowly separating 
from GNOME, and lagging 2 releases behind GNOME (for the first time 
ever in Ubuntu's history, I believe) may just be the next step in that 
process.

adam

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