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

[Marc Deslauriers]

On 13-10-02 05:25 AM, Adam Dingle wrote:
> 
> 
> 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.

The closer we stay with upstream GNOME, the more the desktop ships with stuff
that is simply broken and doesn't work properly because of lack to time to get
all the integration and bug polishing done.

As a user, are you willing to sacrifice a nice, polished, desktop with few bugs
to be able to get a more bleeding edge GNOME?

> 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.

Lagging behind for stability reasons for an LTS doesn't mean we're separating
from GNOME. It just means we want our LTS to be rock-solid by concentrating
effort on fixing all the nagging bugs in a stable code base instead of spending
all our time fixing everything that breaks from using the latest version.

Latest release and buggy, or lagging behind and rock solid. Pick one.

Marc.