Re: GNOME and Ubuntu GNOME

[Tim <darkxst fastmail fm>]

On 27/09/14 23:57, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> 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 That is a pretty minor issue, and its certainly not by our choice that gnome-settings-daemon is outdated.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?
They have moved the old xrandr/idle monitor code into unity-settings-daemon, however this
only landed the other day.
> 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.
Its not like we just plonk them together, we do backport any dbus and gsettings changes
> 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.
gnome-control-center 3.8 was meant to get into 14.04, but it didnt make it though in time :(
> 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. 
We have little control over Gtk+ and that is not really going to change, we will hopefully be landing 
gnome-desktop, gnome-settings-daemon and
gnome-control-center 3.12 into 14.10 this week. We currently have little control over GNOME apps that are 
shared with Unity (Nautilus,
gnome-terminal, gnome-system-monitor etc), however next cycle if Ubuntu keep blocking the key GNOME apps we 
will probably try ship current
versions in a separate source package.

The Ubuntu Desktop team have been pretty supportive of Ubuntu GNOME, its just taking a lot longer than 
expected to decouple things so that we
can have a more independent GNOME stack. I guess we are a fair way down the list of priorities.
> 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