Unity desktop and maverick backport

[Marjo Mercado]

Hi Didier,

Thanks for sharing this proposal. Based on the technical discussion
below, it seems like the right trade-off to make, if we can't have both.

Having said that, it becomes even more important to the overall quality
of the Unity desktop that we ensure as many users try it on Natty as
soon as possible. I'd like to make a few suggestions.

- Send out a call for testing, specific to Unity desktop (QA Team)
- Track Unity related bugs and make sure they are getting triaged and
resolved quickly; Monitor bug reports closely (QA Team-bdmurray)
- Layout key dates for checkpoints (Desktop, DX and QA Teams)
- Make go/no-go recommendation based on test results and bug data (QA
Team)

What do you think?

Thanks,

Marjo

On Thu, 2010-11-18 at 19:25 +0100, Didier Roche wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> 
> As some of you may know, there have been some discussions about
> backporting
> "unity compiz" to maverick as we had backported unity to lucid with a
> dedicated ppa and its own session.
> 
> However, after some porting discussions and following the natty work I
> think
> we should perhaps consider not doing that because it's going to take
> quite
> some work for a moderated benefit and we would better spend those
> efforts in
> making natty rocking.
> 
> Some bits what came from discussions between ubuntu desktop and dx
> teams:
> 
>  * Why do we want to backport? - usually it's to make easier for users
> to test the new version and give some feedback on it. The first round of
> feedback will be about things not starting, or not working at all or
> crashing, we will get that feedback from the natty users. Later on we
> will want extra eyes on the user experience but by the time we are there
> it will be really hard to backport the new stack due to new depends
> (details on that later).
>  * New unity means new compiz which means users will have no working
> desktop left, that's not something we should get our users in. Indeed,
> the new
> compiz is not made to be installed with the old one, the upgrade will
> replace compiz
> 0.8 but has lot of issues still: the configuration is not migrated, the
> keybindings are not working, the workspace layout and switcher are not
> working, the session registration is not working, the desktop capplet
> needs to be updated, the GNOME keybindings capplet is not working. Some
> of those
> issues are fixed in natty, but we can't backporting every single GNOME
> applications
> to make them work in a maverick ppa.
> - the new unity packaging is not made to have old and new unity
> installed at the
> same time so the old unity will not be installed anymore.
>  - the new unity is not usable as a desktop yet, which means the user
> will not
> have the old unity, compiz under GNOME will be broken is several ways
> which let the GNOME session hard to use, the new unity is not ready for
> production ... users who will want to give unity a try will just land in
> a situation when they have no environment left they can use for work...
> it would be less breakage to suggest them to update to natty where we
> fix those integration issues.
>  * The new unity stack will be hard to backport - the next indicators
> uploads will build-depends on gtk3 (even if we don't use it we need to
> have libraries in natty to build gtk2 and gtk3 version to allow people
> to start porting work), we use new glib api, etc. Backporting the stack
> unity will need is going to turn into lot of work and a non trivial
> task.
> 
> We think users will have a better experience by trying unity on natty
> and that we will gather more useful and coherent data, since it's likely
> to be more stable than getting a working - and a less tested by our team
> - backport.
> 
> 
> didrocks on behalf of the ubuntu desktop and dx teams
> 
> 

-- 
Marjo F. Mercado
Ubuntu QA Team Manager
W: (917) 338-6551
IRC: marjo