On Sat, 2014-09-27 at 20:24 +1000, Tim wrote:
Some of the panels in 3.6 were actual separate applications from memory.
No, none of the panels in 3.6 were separate applications upstream; that functionality was removed a long time ago (in 3.2?). You have some downstream patches to add external applications like Deja Dup into the control panel, but that's not what I'm talking about: you have EVERY panel appearing as an application in the overview, making it unnecessarily difficult to find real applications on the system and diluting the effectiveness of the overview, after a behavior change in some component (gnome-shell?) necessitated the addition of NoDisplay=true; to the panel desktop files, and your gnome-control-center does not have that change to the desktop files because it is so old.
That is a pretty minor issue, and its certainly not by our choice that gnome-settings-daemon is outdated.
If the gnome-desktop version is your problem, I bet the Unity developers would fork off a unity-desktop package for you. Otherwise, there wasn't much point in unity-control-center and unity-settings-daemon, was there? Anyway, that was just one more (admittedly minor) example to show the trouble you can run into: you have a bug that you never noticed because you mixed major versions of GNOME software. Whereas the versions of your applications can probably vary without TOO much trouble, you should only ever update core components like gnome-shell, gnome-settings-daemon, and gnome-control-center at the same time. gnome-tweak-tool is another one where something is likely to break if not upgraded in lockstep. These communicate over unstable D-Bus interfaces and assume they're communicating with the corresponding version of the other components. Most things will work correctly, but something is likely to break. It's also sad that Ubuntu GNOME users lack settings that are available in other distros, such as control over notifications, search providers, and all the privacy settings. It's not really wise to vary applications' versions either, although less risky. GTK+ has a few behavior changes each cycle that are publicized in the release notes, and newer GNOME applications are adapted to these behavior changes, but if your version of GTK+ is newer than an application it will not have been changed yet. GTK+ 3.10 was particularly problematic here. This can lead to interesting bugs that are fixed in other distros but linger in Ubuntu GNOME, like dialogs that are too wide, or boxes that aren't expanded so the UI is hidden (a problem you seem to have in your downstream software updater, for example). It seems that Ubuntu GNOME has no control over the software versions that it ships. That's a shame. Maybe your distro would be more successful outside the Ubuntu project. If infrastructure is a concern, I think the Tanglu developers would love to have more people working on their GNOME product. Regardless, good luck. Michael
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