Re: [gnome-flashback] GNOME Flashback maintenance

[Philipp Kaluza <floss ghostroute eu>]

Hi Alberts, hi Dmitry,

Am 18.02.2014 19:09, schrieb Dmitry Shachnev:
> On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 12:52 AM, Alberts Muktupāvels
> <alberts muktupavels gmail com> wrote:
> > Our maintainer/maintainers have not responded here for a long time. 
I asked that some unfinished / unreviewed commits that got pushed to
master were reverted.
That never happened, except for the few I reverted myself.

> > I wanted
> > / I was ready to spend my time to improve gnome-panel, but they are not even
> > responding to questions.
The last question from you that I'm aware of showed a complete lack of
understanding what each branch is targeted at - although I had
documented that _repeatedly_. Which shows me that you don't even read
the mails that I write.

It's really hard for me to find the motivation to work on gnome-panel et
al., when I feel my efforts are sabotaged.

> > So now I am not trying to do anything upstream, but when I have time I am
> > working with forked versions in github.
> I think it may be a better idea to work in "experimental" branch in
> official tree (or something like that), so that it the work is more
> visible to interested developers and downstreams, and so it doesn't
> look like "yet another GNOME fork".

I think that touches the base of our problem.
I had asked for help in rescuing lost features from
gnome-settings-daemon et al, and figuring out how to ship them as part
of Gnome Flashback. Alberts is the one actually actively coding, but
only interested in modernizing the code base, getting rid of deprecated
function usage, and killing GConf.

To be blunt: At the moment, I don't see us (the subproject) surviving
the move to a (still hypothetical) Gtk+ 4, where things like a
deprecated GtkHBox would actually disappear on us. So this kind of work
is just not my priority, and we don't have the strength to pull of a
libpanel-applet ABI bump, much less just for the sake of "just" removing
a GConf dependency.

Alberts: of course I cannot tell you what to work on. I agree with
Dmitry, that it would be best if you continue your work upstream, but in
a feature branch. Create a "feature/remove-foo" or
"feature/modernize-bar" branch, work there, and ask us to review it,
when it's ready. And please try for good commit messages, including
references to bugzilla or relevant mailing list threads.

> Some of your commits (like "fix gweather crash"), should definitely go
> into master as well.

So, what will we do with master ? ATM I lean towards skipping 3.10
entirely, switching everybody to building in a 3.11 environment ASAP,
and trying to hit the 3.12 release.

Regarding that particular commit: if it's a crash fix and well-tested,
we should consider backporting it to the 3.8 branch.

(The stand-alone) Gnome Panel 3.8 does pretty much what I need it to do,
but Gnome Flashback as a whole needs much more integration work and
people interested in stepping up.

Cheers
  Philipp

-- 
Philipp Kaluza
Ghostroute IT Consulting