Re: Upload of GNOME 2.8 to unstable
Do it!
On Wed, 2004-11-10 at 10:51 +0100, Jordi Mallach wrote:
> Hello release team,
>
> The GNOME team have been talking about what the chances are of having
> GNOME 2.8 uploaded to unstable since it was released upstream early in
> September.
>
> While two months ago we never consider this to be a real possibility for
> various reasons (Sarge was going to freeze real soon at that time, GNOME
> 2.6 was rock solid in testing and it's not the smartest thing to ship
> GNOME 2.x.0 versions in a stable release), today things have changed
> enough that we need to reconsider.
>
> GNOME 2.7/2.8 has been packaged and maintained up to date in experimental
> for over 3 months, and at this point we believe it is release-quality
> and ready to go to unstable and testing.
>
> GNOME 2.8.1 has been released already, polishing the major bugs that
> were found in 2.8.0, making it suitable for a Debian stable
> distribution.
>
> The GNOME team has shown signs of tiredness after too much time
> maintaining two branches: most of the bug reports we get against the 2.6
> packages are general GNOME issues that were addressed in GNOME 2.8 (most
> notably the MIME system replacement), or stuff that isn't so trivial to
> backport. After two major GNOME releases packaged as a team, we're
> seeing how we're gradually losing interest because of this situation.
> On a side note, we'd like to start working on GNOME 2.9 and we have no
> sane place to put it (experimental being used by 2.8 already). We're not
> too excited about maintaining _3_ branches, as one can imagine. :)
>
> Debian users _are_ using GNOME 2.8, and while it's available in
> experimental, it's a pain for them as there's no optimal way of
> maintaining an up to date GNOME 2.8 dekstop easily unless completely
> upgrading to experimental.
>
> We'd be ok to stick to GNOME 2.6 in Sarge if it was frozen already, as
> this would let us dump 2.8 in unstable, aliviating most of these
> problems, but the reality is that there isn't a fixed freeze date yet.
> We've tested upgrades and migrations, both complete and partial, from
> 2.6 to 2.8 and apparently everything is solid, so we'd like to get
> permission to upload GNOME 2.8 to unstable, and try to get it in Sarge
> as quick as possible.
>
> If we get your OK to do the upload, my personal opinion is that once 2.8
> is in unstable, it'd be difficult to not end up shipping with GNOME 2.8
> in sarge, as the new shlibs will trickle to not-so-gnome-ish packages
> like Firefox and so. Others may think that it should be possible to work
> as KDE packages are doing it. Again, I'm confident that it'll go
> smoothly.
>
> Thanks,
> Jordi, on behalf of the GNOME team.
--
John McCutchan <ttb@tentacle.dhs.org>
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