[desktop] Sync with GNOME

[Kevin Godby]

Hello, Gunnar.

On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 4:40 PM, Gunnar Hjalmarsson <gunnarhj at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> I just worked with a few pages in the desktop guide, and some of them
> had clear tracks of GNOME syncs that hadn't been sufficiently adapted to
> Ubuntu. This makes we wonder if it's really advisable that we now sync
> with GNOME again.
>
> There are very few - if any - visible changes between 13.10 and 14.04.
> Maybe, instead of syncing, it would be more important to manually scan
> all the pages and try to eliminate as much as possible of remaining
> mismatch between the docs and the desktop that will be shipped?
>
> Kevin, IIRC this is your baby. What do you say?

During the 13.10 cycle, we made it through about three-fourths of the
pages (230 out of 296 pages), so there are a few that still haven't
been brought up to speed with GNOME.

As many of you have pointed out, Unity is diverging more and more from
GNOME.  We're not beholden to the GNOME docs for updates—we can take
them or leave them at our discretion.

We can certainly cut the strings and head off on our own; I have no
qualms about that. It may be handy to compare the subset of our
documentation that coincides with the upstream GNOME docs
periodically, though, as the GNOME docs may gives us a heads-up when
things are changing upstream that we'll have to address soon in Ubuntu
(e.g., control panel applets).

I definitely think we need to audit our current documentation and
update things to match Ubuntu and Unity (instead of GNOME Shell).

—Kevin