Unity desktop and maverick backport

[Bryce Harrington]

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 04:03:32PM -0500, Marjo Mercado wrote:
> 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?

Don't forget to define a test plan for people to follow before sending
out a call for testing.  You might also want to make a page in wiki for
folks to list their findings.

> 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
> 
> 
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