fallback mode vs llvmpipe rendering

[Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org>]

Hi all,

People are contacting me every now and then about gnome-panel. There are
several people willing to work on it to improve it, but more with the
goal of making a "GNOME 2"-like session than a fallback session. So far,
I've been accepting all contributions, except the ones that make the
panel go in another direction than the fallback session.

But there's an interest for going in other directions, and I don't want
to block those motivated people if we don't need gnome-panel anymore for
our "official" GNOME releases, which means if we don't need the fallback
mode anymore. And now that llvmpipe rendering has been available for a
few months, I wonder if we still need (or want) to keep the fallback
session.

If we want to keep the fallback mode, then:
 - obviously, we need to maintain all of the fallback components (at
   least metacity and gnome-panel)
 - we need to keep making sure the fallback experience doesn't degrade
   too much because of changes in other modules

If we feel llvmpipe is enough:
 - we don't need to maintain metacity and gnome-panel as part of the
   official GNOME stack, and they can start a new life
 - we can get rid of some compatibility code in various modules for the
   fallback session
 - we probably need to work on forcing the use of llvmpipe when we know
   hardware acceleration won't work (see
   https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=672943) and find how to
   deal with zaphod multi-screen setups

Whatever we choose, this would at least clarify the current situation,
where some people think llvmpipe is the new fallback, while others
believe we still need to keep alive the fallback components.

For the record, I've no strong opinion on this myself. I might lean
towards going the llvmpipe way so that the people who want to hack
freely on the fallback components may do so.

Oh, and the first person that drives the thread in a "oh, I hate
gnome-shell beause of XYZ, GNOME 2 was so much better" direction will
suffer eternal shame!

Cheers,

Vincent

-- 
Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés.