Bug#154950: Gnome 2 transition
On Wed, Jul 31, 2002 at 12:25:47PM +0200, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> there's a nice flameware in debian-gtk-gnome about how to handle
> the transition to Gnome2.
(Isn't it pretty much Christian's decision whether to invoke the tech
ctte or not?)
> The problem :
> -------------
> Even though upstream have released Gnome 2.0 to the wide public, some
> uystream people still think that Gnome 2 is not yet ready to be imposed to
> our unstable users.
Rather, Jeff Waugh, the Gnome 2.0 release manager, doesn't believe that
most Gnome 1.4 users would consider Gnome 2.0 a useful upgrade until scripts
are written to upgrade users' configuration.
> Current situtation :
> --------------------
> We have some core Gnome2 package in experimental. They have a
> "2" suffix. We have gnome-terminal and sawfish for Gnome 2 in
> unstable (without the "2" suffix). That means we also have some basic
> Gnome2 libs in unstable (it's not a problem, they coexist nicely with
> Gnome1 libs). But we don't have things like new panel and so on in
> unstable. And it's those which are causing problems because they are not
> made to coexist.
And, more particularly, there aren't any configuration upgrade scripts yet.
Christian mentioned a couple of times in the thread that he'd been
working on something to that effect, what actually happened?
> The conflicting solutions :
> ---------------------------
> * Solution one :
> Upload Gnome2 in unstable by replacing the old Gnome1.4 but make sure
> that Gnome 1.4 is kept in sarge until G2D finalizes in unstable.
Personally, I'd consider this a fundamentally dangerous way of doing
things. In particular, in this circumstance, you absolutely should *not*
expect to be able to continue maintaining Gnome 1.4 in sarge, except
for security updates. Not even with sarge-proposed-updates.
> * Solution two :
> Upload some Gnome2 packages in unstable with a new name (adding a "2"
> suffix) so that unstable users can choose to install Gnome 2 or Gnome
> 1.4.
> * Solution three :
> This solution has not really been supported by anyone but I mention it here
> for completeness because it may well turn out to be the best solution.
>
> Work out Gnome 2 in a separate staging area (without any "2" suffix), and
> move it to unstable one day
This is what's happening with perl, see
http://ftp-master.debian.org/~bod/perl/
> (you have to define what is the criterion
> for defining that "one day" because people won't agree otherwise).
The "problem" above should've specified that. AIUI, everyone believes
Gnome2 will be ready for sarge and sid at the point when an upgrade from
1.4 to 2.0 preserves most of the configs of all the users on the machine.
When that happens, that's you day.
> That means that someone will have to handle that staging area. It also
> means that G2D will be less tested on unpopular architectures.
That's what unstable's for, really.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``If you don't do it now, you'll be one year older when you do.''
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