Re: Module Proposal: GNOME Shell

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Mon, 2010-04-05 at 18:26 +0100, Sandy Armstrong wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 12:16 AM, Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> wrote:
> >  tarballs:        http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gnome-shell/
> 
> I notice you guys did only two tarball releases last cycle (and no
> 2.30 release), though there seems to be near-constant activity in git.
>  Is this driven by stability issues, feature churn, or is something
> else up?
> 
> I've found that the best way to keep track of gnome-shell developments
> is jhbuild, since no recent tarballs usually translates to no recent
> packages.  But I admit that I miss tarball releases with their
> easy-to-read NEWS files, compared to skimming through git log whenever
> I update my jhbuild.
> 
> For such a critical component of our desktop, I hope there are more
> releases next cycle, to facilitate more testing.

Well, in the 2.29 cycle, there were a combination of things, mostly:

 * Time. Writing release announcements that are better than
   'git shortlog' takes effort. Finding stable points to make
   release where it's useful for people to package the shell
   for distros takes time.

 * Clutter upgrade to 1.2. This caused a lot of disruption in
   the release schedule.

But, really, just see my reply to Guillaume:

> > During the usability hackfest some people complained that the lack of
> > development releases makes very hard for users to test the shell.
> > Are you planning to follow the 2.31 release cycle?
>
> Yes.

- Owen