Bug#154950: gnome1/gnome2 transition issues
Note: Raphael Hertzog elected to send his message on this subject to
several people and the technical committee, but not send it to the bug
tracking system. I'm electing to quote his message in its entirety
in his response -- I think his message was a good one and I'd like its
content to be available. [I'm leaving it at the bottom of this message,
which is roughly analogous to where it would show up if he had actually
submitted it to the bug tracking system.]
Reading his message, I got the idea that we might have an operational
bottleneck with gnome2 in unstable. Given that people tend to use apt
to upgrade their systems, it's difficult to imagine how gnome1 packages
in unstable will get much exposure before being moved to testing. This
increases the risk that we'll introduce an inadvertent bug into testing
with these packages.
But, I have to ask (since I don't know): Is this really an issue?
Or is it the more general issue that people who rely on gnome can't put
"unstable" in /etc/apt/sources.list? If it's the latter, I'd like
to remind folks that we're early in "unstable" at this point, and my
experience is that you don't want to rely on "unstable" until we begin
to approach release time.
Then again, we do want to be able to come out with releases quicker
than we took for woody...
In the past, I've seen people offer up very unstable packages outside
the official tree, so that regular debian work wouldn't be impacted.
It might make sense to ask Christian to do this with the gnome2 packages,
BUT.. only if doing this would really save work.
Can someone tell me what work would be saved if he were to operate
in this fashion? [Because I think this would involve extra work for
him.]
Also: note that if only one or two package maintainers are affected,
they could themselves create their own aptable web locations so that
people who rely on gnome could put testing and this hypothetical gnome1
repository in sources.list.
Comments?
Thanks,
--
Raul
On Mon, Aug 05, 2002 at 10:55:28AM +0200, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> Le Sun, Aug 04, 2002 at 10:58:58PM -0600, Jason Gunthorpe ?crivait:
> > Er, how many packages are we talking about here?
> >
> > We have in the past kept multiple versions available when they do not
> > conflict and are not very compatible (ie emacs) but if we are talking
> > about 50 packages...
>
> Keepping two Gnome versions in unstable and expect them to be
> releasable at any time is simply not realistic (doable but not realistic
> at all).
>
> Gnome2 means gtk 2, gnome1.4 means gtk 1.2. Having a consistant gnome
> 1.4 in unstable, means keeping old version (working with gtk1.2) of
> all software that are ported to GTK2 (ie all software using gtk).
>
> Most of the time, the switch to GTK2 means that the old gtk1.2 version
> is going to be dropped soon. Therefore we'd have many old applications
> no more supported by the upstream authors. It is really not desirable.
>
> Of course, during the Gnome2 switch, some apps will continue to work
> with 1.4 until they are ported. That means that we won't have a
> fully consistent Gnome2 desktop for several months but that's how
> things are going on. Putting no incentive on porting them to Gnome2 is
> not going to help that move ...
>
> > Even so, what sort of implications are there for having both installed at
> > once?
>
> You just can't. Gnome 1.4 and Gnome 2 provides binaries who have the
> same name... gnome-session, etc.
>
> The 2 set of packages would have to conflict in any case.
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Rapha?l Hertzog -+- http://strasbourg.linuxfr.org/~raphael/
> Formation Linux et logiciel libre : http://www.logidee.com
>
>
> --
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