Re: GNOME and Ubuntu GNOME

[Jim Nelson <jim yorba org>]

For whatever it's worth, I had a lively discussion with Sebastien Bacher about this on ubuntu-desktop (regarding the main flavor of Ubuntu, not GNOME Ubuntu):

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2014-September/004539.html

One note: When I wrote this, I wasn't aware that Ubuntu was shipping such a mix of versions, as Michael points out.

-- Jim

On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 7:39 AM, Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org> wrote:

On Fri, 2014-09-26 at 15:04 +0200, Alberto Ruiz wrote:

From my point of view it is really hard to figure out how to help if we do not know what the problems are. Sebastian's suggestion is not so bad, working closely with the Debian guys and reuse the work, however if you do not state what the problem really is (manpower, technical, infrastructure...) it is really hard for anyone to figure out if we can help at all.

Ubuntu ought to be our most important distro due to its popularity. It's sad that it always releases with obsolete GNOME software. I rarely see users recommend Ubuntu GNOME, and I would not myself for this reason. I tried out Ubuntu GNOME 14.04, opened System Settings, observed that you released with gnome-control-center 3.6(!) despite the unity-control-center and unity-settings-daemon forks that occurred primarily to allow you to update these components, and lost interest pretty quickly. You're in a vicious cycle if you can't attract GNOME developers due to your obsolete software. One possible solution is obvious: ship with your stable PPA enabled by default. I know that's currently prohibited by Ubuntu policy, but try to change it. It's a very serious problem for you, and it's also a problem for Kubuntu (albeit to a much lesser degree). This would solve your problems without hurting the Unity developers at all, and is probably the only reasonable way out of this mess. Alternatively, you could adjust your release cycle to lag more than one month behind GNOME. You seem to set your schedule to minimize your chances of successfully integrating a newer GNOME release. I guess there's no realistic chance of either GNOME or Ubuntu changing schedules, though, which is why I suggest the PPA route. Some related advice: stop shipping different versions of GNOME software in the same release. For example, Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 includes gnome-shell 3.10, gnome-settings-daemon 3.8, and gnome-control-center 3.6. None of those are designed to work together: that's why you have control center panels displayed as if they were applications in the overview, and it's surely causing other bugs as well (I heard that suspend options were broken?). gnome-system-monitor 3.8, gnome-terminal 3.6, most of the games are at 3.8 (and not even the newest 3.8 releases either) but some are at 3.10, most everything else is a mix between 3.10 and 3.8... it seems like you're rolling dice to pick these versions. You'd probably be better off sticking with older software than you are with mixing and matching to unpredictable effect. Ubuntu GNOME would be a much more popular distro if you could manage to overcome these obstacles and start releasing with the latest GNOME. Michael

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