Re: Installing Cinnamon 2.0
On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 8:09 PM, Ralf Mardorf
<ralf.mardorf@alice-dsl.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 2013-10-11 at 18:43 -0400, Tom H wrote:
>> On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 2:57 PM, Ralf Mardorf
>> <ralf.mardorf@alice-dsl.net> wrote:
>>> On Fri, 11 Oct 2013 19:42:44 +0200, Tom H <tomh0665@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> MATE can be installed alongside other DEs on Fedora so I'm not at all
>>>> convinced by this MATE-conflicts-with-"common-software" meme!
>>>> Soneone said upthread that MATE uses GTK2. AFAIK it's being
>>>> transitioned to GTK3 so it'll then be less of a burden to package it
>>>> for Debian.
>>>
>>> Correct, Mate does a transition to GTK3, but as explained before, it still
>>> would be a PITA to make packages for official repositories, since you need
>>> to prevent against such a conflict:
>>>
>>> On Fri, 11 Oct 2013 19:43:43 +0200, Alex Moonshine <afterclouds@gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Sorry, but why would one need mate-file-archiver (Engrampa) and
>>>> file-roller on the same machine? The former is a fork of the latter
>>>> (and to all practical means just the same package under different
>>>> name). Same goes for nautilus/caja, gedit/pluma, etc.
>>>> I think that either you use MATE DE and Engrampa replaces file-roller
>>>> for you, or, if you want to install MATE on a system that already has
>>>> some other DE with file-roller installed, that you want to keep, you
>>>> install mate-base package, which (I believe) includes none of extra
>>>> applications (and you can go on using file-roller under MATE).
>>>
>>> Somebody might want to test GNOME 3 and Mate on the same install. There are
>>> workarounds. I e.g. didn't install mate-file-archiver and add a link
>>> /usr/bin/matedialog -> zenity.
>>
>> One of the reasons for using a distribution is for its maintainers to
>> take care of such issues for their users.
>>
>> Fedora must've dealt with this issue. (I assume that Mint has too!)
>>
>> If Debian were to package MATE, it would do so too. If the Debian
>> maintainers of two packages can't agree, there's a technical committee
>> to propose/impose a solution.
>>
>> The example that you gave was from Arch; its maintainers simply didn't
>> do the right thing (in this particular instance, not overall!). That
>> doesn't mean that MATE is broken or that it breaks other packages.
>
> The Mate repository is definitive _not_ an official Arch repository,
> IIUC it's provided by Mate upstream. However, an official Arch
> repositories would follow upstream.
You're installing from an unofficial repository and complaining about
conflicts. Good one! And welcome to the world of a package maintainer
in a distribution. You had to do something similar to what a MATE
maintainer would have to do; integrate it into Debian.
For simple packages, it may just be a question of grabbing a tarball
and running make but for a DE there's slightly more work than that.
> Even for distros that do not follow upstream there isn't a technical
> solution for this issue that could be solved by a committee.
You really have no clue how distributions are run, do you?
Don't you think that a distribution needs a final authority to resolve
technical issues?
Who decided on the legality of Germany's participation in the EUR
bailouts? Your Bundesverfassungsgericht!
More or less in the same way that Germany has a Federal Constituional
Court, distributions have technical committees that set standards and
arbitrate conflicts. In Debian it's the CTTE, in Fedora it's FESCO,
and in Gentoo it's the Gentoo Council.
For in example, in Debian in the last 18 months, there have been at
least three issues. In short: 1) The GNOME maintainers added to a/the
GNOME metapackage a dependency on NM and the CTTE asked them revert
this change. 2) Two packages were both providing "/usr/bin/node" and
the CTTE came up with a solution. 3) The syslinux maintainer uploaded
a new version during the freeze and the CTTE asked him to revert the
upload.
So, if MATE were to have a conflict with GNOME and their respective
developers couldn't resolve the issue between themselves, they'd ask
the CTTE for a solution.
In Gentoo, the OpenRC maintainer petitioned the Council for booting
with a separate "/usr" partition to require the use of an initramfs
and the Council gave the go-ahead recently.
FESCO meets weekly. One the of the recent topics was how to migrate
the tooling from Python 2 to Python 3 over the next two releases.
Sometimes committees are useful...
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