Bug#609278: ITP: Unity -- Interface for Ubuntu Desktop Edition
Hello Matthias,
> I wanted to ask wether there is any progress of packaging Unity for Debian.
To be absolutely honest it hasn't moved from "ground zero" and I'll
tell you all about it as I go through this email.
> I would love to have it in Debian.
So would I, and from point Unity was even announced to move from
netbooks to desktop back on DebConf10 I saw this as a great
opportunity to have Unity in Debian and for Debian to move closer to
its goal as being the "Universal Operating System".
> If there is anything I can help with, I will be happy to try to do so. At the moment I am not sure what has to be done in
> order to get Unity into Debian.
The most I worked on trying to get Unity in Debian was around UDS-N,
especially after Mark announced that it would replace GNOME desktop on
Ubuntu desktop. The main problem was that there was so many
dependencies, even on some of the most trivial packages you would have
to check what the differences were as there would be some kind of
change done in Ubuntu. By the time you'd get caught up with all of it,
there would be a new changes made on Unity and you would be on the
very start, again. As this seemed of more being in infinite loop then
packaging process, and as I was busy with other things such as
organizing DebConf11, university, so on I just paused the whole
process.
I talked about this topic with various people, ranging from users over
developers to project leaders both from Ubuntu and Debian side. Ubuntu
was very interested in this and was very willing to help, even people
from very top of Canonical were interested and I was even asked by
Mark himself back on UDS-O what's happening with this and I told him
as it was. Something along the line that "Unity's moving too fast, in
a sense that there's a lot of changes happening to Unity and it's very
hard to catch up on all the dependencies and differences between the
packages".
Now, back on DebConf11, I was too busy with organization and kinda
missed the whole conference, but from what I found out from some
informal talks, to be honest besides few people Debian side wasn't
that interested in having Unity, some didn't even see the whole point
of having another DE.
Second and most important point is, if we want to have Unity in Debian
there has to be more then one or few people working in this process
and the only way it can be done is if the whole team of people working
on it. But as I might have mentioned or hinted I think what prevents
it from getting into Debian at this point is more of a philosophical
nature rather then technical.
When it comes to Unity, with Ubuntu 11.10 we can see that it has
greatly matured from what we saw in 11.04 and that it could be
packaged at this point, but AFAIK there's a lot of happening with
development of Unity 5 for 12.04 release, and maybe this could the
best point to have it packaged and pushed into Debian. I'm saying this
from a point that Debian 7 will be released in some ~6-7 month time
period, at this point even if it gets pushed into Debian by then I
don't see a point of having it in there. Especially from the point
that I highly doubt that Unity 5 will be managed to be pushed into
Debian 7 after its release in Ubuntu 12.04. And I don't know how much
would you like to have current Unity in Debian 7 until Debian 8 gets
released ...
In general, I think why Unity is important and what it means for *all*
Linux distributions was summed in last couple of minutes of UDS-P
keynote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bOwyGYTMv8&feature=youtu.be&t=24m48s
After DebConf11 I'm busy with finishing my studies, and want to devote
more time to Java team, as of this point chances of getting Unity into
Debian doesn't look too bright, and as it seems right now all we can
do is give it more time and wait as for some products time is the key
factor. In the end please note that with everything that I said here
I'm not being pessimistic but rather just realistic.
2011/11/17 Matthias Kümmerer <matthias@matthias-k.org>:
> Hi,
>
> I wanted to ask wether there is any progress of packaging Unity for Debian. I
> would love to have it in Debian. If there is anything I can help with, I will
> be happy to try to do so. At the moment I am not sure what has to be done in
> order to get Unity into Debian.
>
>
> Matthias
>
>
>
--
Adnan
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