On Tue 2022-03-29 19:09:50 +0100, Simon McVittie wrote: > Major GNOME components are expected to be upgraded together, except for > when that's unnecessary. That is an unsatisfying answer, but unfortunately > it's the only true answer.
Thanks for the clarification, Simon, even if it's unsatisfying. It's disappointing to hear that about GNOME: i'd have expected the project overall to have taken more time to think about API issues given the amount of ecosystem knowledge (and dependency hell scars) that i'm sure exists within the active developers. I do understand the tradeoffs between rigidity and fluidity that you describe, and how you can get unmanageable delays on one end, and hidden breakage on the other. That tradeoff is precisely why i'm inclined to gravitate toward declaring something API-like, even between "internal" components. I tend to think that approach will give the best balance possible on that tradeoff, but i also recognize that getting there requires some significant engineering investment (in both tooling and training) if that's not already established practice. >> GNOME typically does a good job in handling a novice user's behaviors >> well without hassling them with confusing technical arcana, but that >> means that silent and complete crashes like the one observed here just >> look like unrecoverable breakage to the normal user who doesn't know >> anything about stderr or how to launch settings from the terminal. > > Sorry, but that normal user probably should not be using unstable. Agreed, the normal user is most likely to use a released version of Ubuntu, which as you said is shipping a mixed set of packages. Yikes! Thanks very much for your work on GNOME, Simon! --dkg
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