Ubuntu 14.10 onwards: Convergence is coming...

[Sebastien Bacher]

Le 15/04/2014 04:32, Robert Ancell a écrit :
> With 14.04 wrapping up it's time to start thinking about what we can
> do with the desktop post LTS. I think there's one big theme we need to
> focus on - Convergence. All the Unity 8 goodness that is going into
> the phone / tablet builds is coming our way and we need to be prepared
> for that migration.

Hey Robert, thanks for sending that email
>
>
>
> Deprecate gnome-session

Right, the first step there is probably to get systemd user session in
the picture (we don't want to do work based on something that is
moving/going to be replaced). The foundation team has been discussion
the migration plan during the previous vUDS, we should check with them
what they envision for the user sessions.


>
> Put screensaver management into the shell.
> We currently use gnome-screensaver but upstream has deprecated it. We
> replaced the first part of this in 14.04 by using the shell to render
> the lock screen. We should be able to get rid of all of
> gnome-screensaver now.
That happened for trusty no?
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/7.2.0+14.04.20140410-0ubuntu1

In normal sessions g-s is not running anymore (I'm unsure about a11y,
there were discussions on whether the screen reader was working good
enough in unity-lock of if we should still fallback to g-s for those cases)
>
> Put PolicyKit handling into the shell.
> We use policykit-gnome for the dialogs but GNOME uses the shell for
> this. We should be doing the same. A nice to have would be to
> implement this in both Unity 7 and Unity 8 but as long as it is there
> by convergence then we're good to go.
Having them in the shell would probably make sense. Did we have a design
for those? IIRC, at the different of GNOME, we wanted them more like
"normal dialogs" (e.g not doing the "dim the screen/grab focus/be in the
middle locking everything else"). If that's the case we might want to
keep the -gnome version for unity7 (since the shell is not using an "app
toolkit").

> Gut unity-settings-daemon
> We forked gnome-settings-daemon so we could stick with the version we
> have currently. Now we should start pulling out the plugins and
> migrating to the new services (e.g. power). Any remaining services
> need to be rehomed / made into standalone services. By convergence
> there should not be u-s-d anymore.

Right, a lot of that is going to require the MIR/new services to work/be
used on desktop though.
>
> Make Ubuntu System Settings [1] desktop capable
> ubuntu-system-settings doesn't cover a lot of the use cases that
> unity-control-center does. So we should add functionality to
> ubuntu-system-settings so that it first a capable alternative to u-c-c
> then eventually can completely replace it.

That item is similar to the previous one. We also need desktop designs
for ubuntu-system-settings.
>
> Help get core apps in a state so that they can replace our current
> defaults. Candidates are things like calculator, file manager.
The file manager is probably not going to be that easy. Having
calculator/notes/camera would be nice though. Not sure how much we need
to work on the look/visual consistency there.
> Are there any other good opportunities for us to start tackling?
>
Your list seems a pretty good one. I don't see any obvious candidate at
the moment but I'm going to take some time to think about the topic and
follow up later, if I find some.

Cheers,
Sebastien Bacher