Unity desktop and maverick backport

[Shane Fagan]

Well there always is VMs and separate ubuntu installs for testing
without breakages affecting your desktop usage. 

--fagan

On Thu, 2010-11-18 at 10:47 -0800, Rick Spencer wrote:
> In my opinion, for what it is worth, this sounds like an unfortunate,
> but necessary trade off. 
> 
> I think we will lose a fairly large degree of testing and feedback, by
> forcing interested contributors to move Natty so early. However, I think
> it's rational to trade that for an increased focus on the ultimate
> quality of the new compiz-based unity in Natty and beyond.
> 
> I think we'll get the most useful feedback from people *using* Unity.
> So, this means that we'll need to focus on supporting early Natty
> adopters, for instance paying more attention to quickly resolving
> adoption blocking bugs. 
> 
> My $.02
> 
> Cheers, Rick
> 
> 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
> > 
> > 
> 
> 
>