On Mon, Aug 05, 2002 at 03:48:11PM +0200, Raphael Hertzog wrote: > > 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. > Gnome 2 is not very unstable. None of the problems mentionned would > result in a non-fonctionnal desktop. I'm not sure the word "unstable" is really the bone of contention. The question seems to be "Is Gnome2 ready for users?" and upstream seem to be saying that the answer to that question is "No, not until it's possible to preserve your configuration settings when upgrading from 1.4". I don't see how you can expect to find a solution until you -- which is really to say, Christian as the Gnome maintainer and Jeff Waugh on behalf of Gnome 2 upstream, can agree on what the problem is. If you can't even agree what you're talking about, it's impossible to estimate its importance. In particular, you end putting yourself in irresolvable conflicts like: ] > > 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/ ] Yes but as soon as all the modules are collected they are moved into ] unstable. And NMU will be done for packages not updated in time. ] ] Here, people don't want Gnome 2 to go in unstable if it replaces Gnome ] 1.4. Putting Gnome 2 in unstable, and removing Gnome 1.4 from unstable aren't a matter of choice, or even debate. The question is when to do it: what, if any, missing features need to be added to Gnome 2 before it should be shunted onto our userbase. A possible answer is "none, it's fine as is", in which case the solution is obvious: upload straight to unstable as soon as you've ported stuff. A possible answer is "we need to write some code to handle configuration upgrades", in which case you need to find someone to do that. Is anyone actually willing to do that? There seem to be a lot of people happy to talk about it, but the only person who seems to have /done/ anything is Christian. If no one's willing to do it, it's not worth wasting time over. Anyway, the point of setting up a separate area as Brendan has is that it gives you somewhere to mess around with things, without having to commit to maintaining them in any particular way, or to worry about people who aren't interested in helping you out getting irritated and filing bugs. Basically it seems to have the exact benefits of having "gnome2-*" packages, without the problem of having to rename them all at some later date. (Using experimental's possible too; although people can't just add it to their sources.list and get the new Gnome with a dist-upgrade, so it can be more awkward. The only loss compared to using unstable is that your packages won't get autobuilt on non-i386 until they are uploaded to unstable, but you don't get a choice about that anyway, and since your changes aren't arch-specific, that's unlikely to matter at all) If it were me, I'd setup a gnome2 repository, copied from Brendan's scripts, package bunches of Gnome2, and then see how much people really hate losing their settings and work on fixing it somewhat, or notice that people don't really care that much, and just move the packages straight into unstable. That lets you continue to do development without having to worry whether you're right or Jeff's right, and also gives you a way of letting users give some sort of opinion on the issue (best measured by how many patches they submit to the BTS, IYAM...) 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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