future of GNOME Flashback and GNOME-2-related packages?
On Wed, 06 Apr 2016 at 00:18:10 +0200, Ondřej Surý wrote:
> I have a feeling that we are hoarding packages, but the overall quality
> varies a lot (not pointing fingers here)
This, and occasional mentions of gnome-screensaver in the xscreensaver
debacle, reminded me that the GNOME team is still responsible for
quite a lot of pre-GNOME-Shell packages, notably the Flashback suite
(-screensaver, -panel, -power-manager). It's clear to people who are
involved in GNOME upstream that these are deprecated, and in particular
that they are unnecessary for GNOME 3 users, but this isn't necessarily
very clear to non-experts.
We've had Shell in two stable releases now, and we now have both Cinnamon
and MATE available for fans of the traditional desktop. Is it time to
be more aggressive about removing gnome-flashback and its dependencies,
maybe with transitional packages to upgrade (sidegrade?) to one of the
GNOME forks for people who want that?
Alternatively, if people are still maintaining Flashback as a distinct
project (both upstream and downstream), can/should we give a stronger
indication that it isn't part of the core GNOME suite, and should be
treated as its own distinct desktop environment? Perhaps it should even
have a distinct Maintainer team?
Similar question for the libraries and infrastructure bits that have
been superseded upstream and are now discouraged: Gtk 2, libgnome,
gnomevfs, gconf, gnome-desktop 2 and so on. These are particularly
annoying because some non-GNOME software that wants to "integrate with
GNOME" still uses them - for instance see Java, vim-gnome (which is a
trap, people should probably prefer vim-gtk or even the new vim-gtk3),
dia-gnome, stardict-gnome.
S
Reply to: