Metapackage strategy for GNOME 3

[Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org>]

Hi,

in order to get GNOME 3 from experimental installable easily by users,
I’m considering doing the metapackages soon - even if it means not
waiting for everything to be ready.

Upstream split their modules between (mostly) platform, core and
featured applications, the featured applications list still being far
from what we need on a default desktop.


I am proposing to keep the gnome-core metapackage and to use it for the
core upstream packages. The condition for that is for these to stick on
a single CD. This will probably have to be checked afterwards with the
CD team.

As for the high-level metapackages, I can envision two strategies: 
      * Drop gnome-desktop-environment entirely, only keeping gnome that
        would include upstream featured apps in addition to the ones we
        select. 
      * Replace it by gnome-apps that would contain upstream blessed
        applications, and make gnome depend on gnome-apps.
Given the lack of clear upstream rules for featured applications, I’m
seeing the first approach work better for the long term.

We should probably keep gnome-devel as is. I’d like to use the
opportunity to rename gnome-core-devel to gnome-platform-devel, but you
can also keep the name.

I’m wondering whether gnome-accessibility still makes sense. It probably
does no harm keeping it and making gnome-core recommend it, but pushing
all of its contents to gnome-core and making accessibility a first-class
citizen like upstream does would be nice.

I don’t know what to do with gnome-office. We could probably merge its
contents directly into gnome, I don’t see the point of a specific
package.


As for the “mini”-metapackage that is gnome-session, I’m not entirely
sure. Given the number of interested people and the number of desktop
environments Debian is shipping, I think it makes more sense to propose
both GNOME and GNOME fallback as available sessions directly into GDM.

This would imply: 
      * gnome-session depending on gnome-shell, mutter, g-s-d, and a few
        others; 
      * gnome-session-fallback (or -classic, or gnome2-session, or
        whatever cool name you come up with) depending on gnome-panel,
        metacity, g-s-d and the same others; 
      * gnome-session recommending gnome-session-fallback; 
      * gnome-core depending on both.
The alternative is a single gnome-session depending on both gnome-shell
and gnome-panel, and leaving only one way to switch to the fallback
mode, in the control center. I think it might be feasible in the future,
but I’m expecting too much backlash if we follow upstream on this right
now.

Thoughts anyone?
-- 
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