Re: Bug#154950: Thoughts on GNOME 2 transition
<quote who="Joey Hess">
> I don't know much about gnome, and this is more of a generic question that
> I considered redirecting to debian-devel. We seem to be more and more
> reluctant to hose unstable, to the extent of keeping new X and now gnome
> out of it for a long time. Staging areas are fine for stuff like perl
> where they are expected to be used for only a few weeks, but once users
> have to learn about the staging area to get programs they need, is it not
> just better to put it in unstable?
I'd venture to say that 'things like perl' are different -> one generally
doesn't use unstable as a production development environment, though one
often uses unstable as a development workstation (so you can actually test
what you're packaging and working on with recent software).
Hosing X and GNOME means hosing the desktops of developers and testers, so
it's a bit less kind. Making sure that migrations are done fairly seamlessly
(they don't have to be perfect, just usable) seems important to me, thus my
various suggestions for doing it smoothly.
My point with G2D is that upgrading things piecemeal will upset everyone's
desktops, but doing it in one hit may work. The only issue you have then is
that G2D doesn't provide any migration of settings.
I would tentatively agree with a complete upgrade to G2D in unstable without
the migration stuff finished, given that it will just make users have to fix
up their settings. However, allowing them the option means that we'd get
better testing of the migration scripts from the people who were genuinely
interested in trying it out, and no flames from people pissed off that their
desktop has been hosed.
- Jeff
--
"GNOME, launched specifically to counter a threat to our freedom, is
the free software project par excellence." - Richard Stallman
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