Bug#1043144: transition: mutter/gnome-shell 44

[Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org>]

On Sun, 06 Aug 2023 at 18:21:29 +0100, Simon McVittie wrote:
> It's about time we migrate GNOME Shell 44 to unstable.

I think this is ready to go. Repeating the list of packages needing
sourceful uploads from experimental into unstable in approximately this
order, for the release team's convenience:

* mutter
* gnome-shell
* gnome-shell-extensions
* gnome-remote-desktop
* budgie-desktop
* gnome-shell-extension-bluetooth-quick-connect
* gnome-shell-extension-gsconnect
* gnome-shell-extension-tiling-assistant

And then any remaining extensions in
https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/bts-usertags.cgi?user=pkg-gnome-maintainers%40lists.alioth.debian.org&tag=gnome-shell-44
will need temporarily removing from testing to let the transition through.

The release team has traditionally been relatively trigger-happy about
removing broken Shell extensions, since they are clearly less important
than GNOME itself. When the transition is otherwise ready to migrate,
I'll provide a full list of packages needing removal.

> There is one current blocker, #1042980, which is that gnome-shell is
> failing build-time tests on mips64el and mipsel.

This has essentially been resolved.

There is an apparent bug in llvmpipe, which we would normally use to run
the build-time tests: https://bugs.debian.org/1049404

There is also an apparent timing-, thread- or race-condition-related bug
in gnome-shell or one of its dependencies, seen only when using softpipe:
https://bugs.debian.org/1049407

I think neither of these needs to be RC or block this transition, since
GNOME is primarily designed to be used on hardware GPUs (and secondarily
on fast x86 VMs with working llvmpipe), so we're now skipping the affected
tests on mips(64)el.

> I've asked a mips porter to confirm whether Shell
> v43 works with unstable's LLVM and Mesa or whether it is already broken

According to mips porter YunQiang Su, both v43 and v44 work acceptably
on the category of mips64el hardware where it would be reasonable to
run a full GNOME session (with an AMD GPU supported by Mesa).

    smcv