Hi! As you know, the Debian GNOME team has been working on packaging GNOME 2.6 during the last weeks. While many of us didn't count on having them ready to opt for their inclussion in Sarge when we started, the situation has changed now that packages are judged to be at least unstable quality. We'd like to hear what the release people think about attempting to get GNOME 2.6 and GTK 2.4 into Sarge immediately. We have a number of reasons to think that this can be done with hopefully no major transition problems in Sid/Sarge: - the packages have had a wide testing, and the -gtk-gnome list has been very active with user reports of problems that have been fixed. - the packages have been tested on !i386 thanks to Michel Dänzer's powerpc builds, which have uncovered some build errors that have also been fixed. - while a few new source packages have been added, the number of sources with new binary packages, compared to unstable, is relatively low, as most of the splits of data files to -data/-common packages were propagated to the GNOME 2.4 packages too. - AFAWCT, GNOME 2.6 wouldn't affect debootstrap sarge/sid at all: one of the transitions that have been performed in the new packages, the switch to gnutls10 isn't an issue as gnutls10 is already in Sarge's base system. Before considering an upload to unstable, we would still need to complete two outstanding TODO items: - Debian #241706 / GNOME #138454: libeel2 btroke backwards compatibility - Transition of GConf schemas files to /var The first issue is probably serious and needs to be fixed. For the second, we have a plan that should work transparently and will allow both the new and old location for schemas work while the transition is ongoing (something like the /usr/doc transition). There's no problem if Sarge releases with some of the schemas files in /etc still. This is not *required*, but very desirable. GNOME 2.6 also fixes some bad bugs present on all versions of GNOME 2.4, most notably the broken smb browsing. The transition to gnutls10 also has positive side effects: it helps gdm be able to use pam_ldap correctly, and some other GNOME software which uses gnutls to actually work (gossip, for example). Would the release team bless this attempt? The GNOME team thinks we can make it. Jordi, for the GNOME Team -- Jordi Mallach Pérez -- Debian developer http://www.debian.org/ jordi@sindominio.net jordi@debian.org http://www.sindominio.net/ GnuPG public key information available at http://oskuro.net/~jordi/
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