Re: What can GNOME do to help distros in the switch to GNOME 3?

[Brian Cameron <brian cameron oracle com>]

Vincent:

I know many distros are planning to support GNOME 2.x for some time in
recently released or upcoming LTS (Long Term Support) releases.  So, I
think one of the biggest hurdles for making the transition smooth is
that GNOME 2 and 3 are not parallel installable.  This makes it hard
for distros who will be supporting GNOME 2 to provide GNOME 3 packages
for those who want to use GNOME 3.  Since LTS releases come out so
infrequently, it could be a long time before GNOME 3 can be made
available on some distros.  I would think some effort in making GNOME 2
and 3 be more parallel installable would help.

I would think that before most distros would adopt it, there would need
to be a fairly straightforward migration story and information about how
well GNOME supports the sorts of compatibility issues that distros are
likely to care about.  For example:

- Do distros need to do anything to manage user configuration
  transition, or does that just work well out-of-the-box?
- For example, even if GNOME is not parallel installable, does it work
  reasonably if a user runs both GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 on different
  machines but using the same shared $HOME directory?
- Are compatibility issues documented?

Brian



> There was some discussion on IRC about GNOME 3 TODOs wrt downstream, and
> I guess it doesn't hurt to ask here :-)
>
> For your distribution, is there anything you believe GNOME can do to
> make the switch to GNOME 3 easier. This could include:
>
>   - good documentation for users, to explain the changes (what kind of
>     details, what kind of changes?)
>
>   - nice notes for packages, so they know what's tricky while updating
>     the packages (what kind of stuff is usually tricky for you?)
>
>   - writing scripts to make sure some configuration is kept (even though
>     upstream GNOME might consider that it's preferred for user to start
>     with a brand new configuration for a specific app)
>
>   - etc.
>
> I believe that with GNOME 2.x, most of this was usually not too hard,
> and even though we might not have done a good job at communicating with
> downstream for version bumps, the information was findable. But GNOME 3
> is a much bigger leap, so we'd like to at least try to improve
> communication :-)
>
> Thanks,
>
> Vincent