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

[Brian Cameron <brian cameron oracle com>]

Piñeiro:

On 10/22/12 01:30 PM, Piñeiro wrote:
> On 10/22/2012 05:36 PM, Brian Cameron wrote:
> Probably you didn't get any concrete answer as most of the
> technical/community decisions are not made by the GNOME Foundation
> Board. As I mentioned on last Boston Summit, now and then a thread about
> what to do about fallback mode appears. And someone mentions that they
> know "someone" that are interested on fallback mode (not only as user),
> but that "someone" doesn't appear at the thread.
>
> So if Oracle desktop team are interested on it, what are their plans
> about fallback mode? Because after all, this thread is not only about
> drop or not fallback mode, but about what to do it it is not dropped.
> What that team propose to fix it? As a reference, at the wiki [1] there
> are several questions if the conclusion is maintain it.

Oracle has done some testing with GNOME 3 on Solaris.  GNOME Shell
works okay on Solaris systems that support OpenGL, but significant
effort is still needed to make GNOME Shell ready for Solaris users.
Though I should highlight that there has not yet been any testing of
GNOME 3 a11y features on Solaris yet, so I am not sure how well that
works.

Based on our testing, GNOME 3 Fallback Mode already works reasonably
well on Solaris.  It already works quite well with Sun Ray, for
example.  The major bits of work that have been identified is that
GNOME 3 Fallback needs work to support Solaris specific features such
as Solaris Trusted Extensions, and the fact that it is necessary to
rewrite several Solaris-specific panel applet plug-ins to use D-Bus
instead of bonobo.  I though GNOME Fallback Mode was being dropped so
development could be focused on GNOME Shell, not because GNOME 3
Fallback is particularly bad, but I may well be misinformed about this.

Since Oracle would be interested in having panel applets work across
GNOME 3 Fallback mode and GNOME Shell, helping to come up with the best
way to make this work would likely also be interesting to the Solaris
GNOME team to help with, if a solution is not already in place.

I would say that it is very probable that people at Oracle could be
found to help with maintainership duties for particular GNOME Fallback
modules if help like this is needed.  Or, perhaps it would be useful to
setup a forum where people interested in GNOME Fallback can focus
discussion on how to fix high priority bugs.  I think there are people
at Oracle who would like to participate in more discussion about GNOME
portability and fallback mode if it were more clear where discussion
was being held.

The FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Solaris communities often share many of the
same issues, so there is surely value in getting these communities to
better work together to solve common problems.  Also, Solaris is 
probably not the only platform that needs a supported non-OpenGL
desktop solution.

Brian