For the benefit of those following the discussion who haven't already heard via IRC or otherwise, I suppose I should mention here that the release team is running out of objections to GNOME 2.8 in unstable that the GNOME team hasn't satisfactorily addressed; which means we'll probably sign off on GNOME 2.8 in sid shortly, once we know precautions are taken to address the last of our concerns. However, it's the last paragraph of Jordi's email that I'm most concerned about, and felt needed a response: On Wed, Nov 10, 2004 at 10:51:39AM +0100, Jordi Mallach wrote: > If we get your OK to do the upload, my personal opinion is that once 2.8 > is in unstable, it'd be difficult to not end up shipping with GNOME 2.8 > in sarge, as the new shlibs will trickle to not-so-gnome-ish packages > like Firefox and so. Others may think that it should be possible to work > as KDE packages are doing it. Again, I'm confident that it'll go > smoothly. First, the results of partial upgrade testing you provided upon request were specifically sought after to ensure that any non-viable (i.e., unreleasable) package combinations would be sorted out before uploading to unstable. I consider it not only not difficult, but *likely* that sarge will ship with a mix of GNOME 2.6/2.8, since the first of the libs will probably make it into testing much sooner than the last of the apps (even if we just count those maintained by the GNOME team), and there's a good chance the freeze will happen in the meantime. So hopefully we're in agreement about what "end up shipping with GNOME 2.8" means. Second, KDE in unstable is not a good model to follow. Between longstanding FTBFS bugs that ensured KDE 3.3 could not migrate to testing regardless of release policy, and the lack of testing autobuilders ensuring that no RC bugfixes make it to testing either, the upload of kdelibs 3.3 to unstable increased workload for both the KDE maintainers and the release team. Any proposal for GNOME 2.8 in sarge will fare much better if judged on its own merits instead of pointing to KDE 3.3 for precedent. Cheers, -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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