On Wed, Jul 31, 2002 at 03:01:30PM +0200, Raphael Hertzog wrote: > [Christian] wrote 3 conversion scripts for gnome-terminal, gnome-session and > gnome-panel. > > 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. > There's no evidence that this may automatically happen one day. Of course it won't happen "automatically". It'll happen precisely when people get out there and write the upgrade scripts. Now, personally, I'd've thought the Gnome2 hackers should've written those scripts before they released Gnome2. But they didn't, and if they don't care about our users, well, that's our job anyway. There're two possibilities: we either say the same thing that Gnome upstream did, ie "Your configuration settings aren't considered important. If you liked 'em, recreate 'em. It's all too much effort for us." and put Gnome2 into unstable as is, or we say "Gnome upstream are completely incompetent and should never have released Gnome2 yet. Unlike them, we're not incompetent, and we're going to spend some time doing the work those lazy sonsabitkas should've done, and make sure your upgrades are as smooth as they can be." If we want to do the former, then we replace Gnome1.4 in unstable, and let Gnome2 roll into testing in the usual fashion. If the latter's considered better -- which it certainly seems to be to me, although I gave up on Gnome configuration ages ago -- then people need to setup somewhere that they can *write* such scripts, and work out a way of delivering them. This can happen after everyone with unstable installed has lost all their settings, but that'd be something of a waste, at least. Updating people's settings doesn't have to be too clever or automatic, if that's difficult. I don't know enough about the way Gnome1.4 / Gnome2 to make definite comments, but a fairly good arrangement would be something like: * admin installs gnome2.0 * user who used to run gnome1.4 logs in, finds spartan desktop, sees an icon "Reconfigure based on my old Gnome 1.4 settings" * user double clicks, runs scripts, gets told to log out and log back in again * user does so, sees something not completely repulsive Note that supporting partial upgrades makes this difficult: if you just upgrade gnome-terminal, your desktop won't be very spartan but you'll still have lost your gnome-terminal settings. Just dumping all of Gnome2 in unstable on a single day could "optimise" this so that few enough people are affected that it's not worth caring. Anyway, the point of a staging area is to give you somewhere to do this development until you get to a point where it's ready for public consumption, nothing more. Breaking unstable is fine, just try to avoid breaking it in ways that you know can't be fixed for quite a while. 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.''
Attachment:
pgpK6__9gWHm1.pgp
Description: PGP signature