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

[Brian Cameron <brian cameron oracle com>]

Allan:

I also think it is important to encourage distros, and the engineers
who work on GNOME at various distros to make use of this mailing list
to let each other know when we identify problems.

It would be nice if there were some way to aggregate bugs in the
various distro bug tracking systems.  Where you could create a bug
and link it to related upstream bugs so that people could easily
collaborate and share fixes to issues that are noticed.  Or
something to this effect.

It would also be good if we could do more to encourage people to
provide ongoing maintenance for GNOME 2.30/2.32 issues.  For example,
nautilus bug #602500 was recently identified on this list as being
a serious nautilus 2.30 crasher.  Perhaps we could do more to encourage
a new 2.30 dot-release when serious issues like this are identified.

Brian


On 03/ 2/11 03:17 PM, Allan Day wrote:
> Hi Brian,
>
> Brian Cameron wrote:
> > 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?
>
> Thanks, that's extremely useful information. There are already some
> migration documents which we can advertise. A technical overview of the
> compatibility and migration story certainly sounds like something that
> we could do and which would be useful, though.
>
> I'll look into it!
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Allan