Keep, modify or drop Ubuntu's headerbar patches

[Jeremy Bicha]

We started discussing this issue at last week's Desktop Team meeting
but it is complicated and difficult enough that we decided to move it
to the mailing list instead.

On Mon, Oct 30, 2017 at 10:05 PM, Jeremy Bicha <jbicha at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> 2. What to do with all the headerbar patches?
> https://launchpad.net/bugs/1719322
>   a. We could drop the ones that haven't been pushed upstream (to GNOME)
>   b. We could keep them but set them to only apply against Unity

One of the Desktop Team goals was to reduce the Ubuntu-specific
patches we are carrying. We made great progress in Ubuntu 17.10 by
dropping Ubuntu Online Accounts, but we are still carrying a lot of
patches.

There are two major kinds of headerbar patches.. One replaces the
headerbar with a patch to add a separate titlebar. These patches was
more important when non-GNOME desktops and themes had trouble with the
headerbars.

The second kind of patch restores a traditional File/Edit/View (FEV)
menu to apps that have removed theirs. This is nice for Unity's
menubars, but in my opinion aren't necessarily better for users in
other desktops. There is resistance to upstreaming these patches to
Debian GNOME because they add lots of translatable strings without
providing translations.

The FEV patches potentially are more difficult to maintain. For
instance, we kept the titlebar patch for Nautilus in Ubuntu 16.10 and
17.04 but not the FEV because no one volunteered to do the work.

There is a large and growing number of apps that have headerbars that
Ubuntu never patched. Also, more apps are converting to them (for
instance, I expect Firefox to get headerbars before Ubuntu 18.04 is
released). I think there's a strong argument that can be made that
Ubuntu should generally distribute apps as intended by the developers
unless we are fixing a significant bug.

Sometimes these patches were set to apply only to Unity and sometimes
they were set to apply to anywhere that wasn't GNOME. And sometimes
the patches introduce bugs when they are applied outside GNOME.

One other issue: Unity currently can't handle locally integrated menus
for apps with headerbars
https://launchpad.net/bugs/1720555

Thanks,
Jeremy Bicha