Re: 3.8 "feature": Drop or Fix Fallback Mode

[Antoine Jacoutot <ajacoutot gnome org>]

On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 04:55:50PM +0200, Vincent Untz wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> The discussion about features is supposed to heat up next week, but I'll
> actually be offline. So I'd like to start discussion on the fallback
> mode today.
> 
> First of all, go read the wiki page:
>  https://live.gnome.org/ThreePointSeven/Features/DropOrFixFallbackMode
> 
> It more or less documents the current situation with the fallback mode.
> And I'm of the opinion that we can't accept this situation for 3.8
> anymore.
> 
> So, the two alternatives I can think of are:
> 
>  a) get more people to work on the fallback mode so that it has a high
>     enough quality and follows the current vision of the project
> 
>  b) do not have a fallback mode anymore (or at least, not the current
>     one...)
> 
> (if anyone can think of another option, please raise your voice)
> 
> Please note that option b doesn't necessarily mean that all of the
> features present in GNOME for the fallback mode get dropped too (this
> would need to be discussed, and this is possibly up to each maintainer),
> nor that fallback modules suddenly stop to be maintained (although this
> might happen if nobody steps up). It's merely about stopping to endorse
> as offical the current fallback mode.
> 
> It'd be useful to know to what extent people would be affected if we
> stop supporting the fallback mode. For instance, last June, Antoine
> mentioned that llvmpipe support is not there yet on OpenBSD...

Hi Vincent.

llvmpipe support is now somewhat working on OpenBSD. However it is not yet enabled by default (but will be in the upcoming months, so I wouldn't worry about it).
The drawback though is that llvmpipe performance is just not usable for any real work on a workstation. For now, due to the lack of KMS (slowly being worked on), we are stuck with Mesa 7.X.
We are looking into merging some stuffs from newer version that could help with the performance but I'm not really hopeful it'll improve that much. That said, technically, it works, I can have gnome-shell running on llvmpipe today.
As far as I am concerned and as one of the GNOME packager for OpenBSD, I wouldn't cry if the fallback mode in its current state disappeared... I'd rather have to choose between a fully supported GNOME or no GNOME at all than to rely on a bugy fallback mode. I run it on a couple of places and there are many smallish UI issues which make it look bad. Add to this that some apps now require clutter to work, then i don't see the point in the current fallback mode.

So to summarize, I fully agree with your a and b points.

-- 
Antoine