Here's my current thinking on this gnome1/gnome2 transition issue. Please note that I'm not able to run X right now, so I have no current experience to bring to bear -- I'm basing my thinking on what other people have written. Also, if I was running X, I suspect I'd prefer KDE over Gnome (Gnome2 might have addressed my reasons for this preference, but currently Gnome2 is not a mature system).
There are several ways we could treat this transition: Sometimes when new packages are introduced (especially libraries), we define the packages so that the new and the old can sit side-by-side. Most of the time, however, we arrange so that the new version replaces the old version. Gnome isn't a single package, however, it's a large collection of packages. Furthermore, while parts of gnome2 are ready for use, other parts haven't been written yet. And, finally, while some parts of gnome2 are almost identical to gnome1 (for example: sawfish, except for build instructions), other parts of gnome2 are radically incompatible with gnome1 (apparently because major bits of cruft have been gutted out of gnome2). Some people aren't happy with the way the maintainer of these packages is dealing with this issue, and this committee has been asked to come in and make a technical decision. I'm not completely clear what this "technical decision" would be about: There is apparently some interest in keeping gnome1 alive (for how long?) but not on the part of the package maintainer. [If there was enough interest, someone could take the gnome1 packages, introduce them under new names, and define that they replace older packages of such and such version or less, and such and such names. There could easily be political problems with this solution -- and I doubt that there's enough interest to pull this off in a technically valid fashion -- but I suspect it's doable. Essentially, you'd want a "task-like" package to be built to manage the transition, and it would make sense to use an instance of the dpkg build tools to locally build a "task-like" package based on the gnome1 packages currently installed on the machine. Needless to say: there's a lot of technical expertise which would be required to pull this off in a decent fashion, and more expertise would be needed to maintain gnome1.] There is some frustration that the packages in unstable conflict with (and don't provide replacements for) packages in testing. [this may eventually be resolved upstream, but it's hard to predict the future.] There is some frustration that the new packages don't deal with configuration files built for the older packages [it looks like this is being resolved by the package maintainer, but given that some packages don't even exist yet for gnome2 this can only be a partial solution]. If there's any other aspect to this problem, I've overlooked it. It's tempting (though probably premature) to treat this whole situation by filing bugs against the gnome1 packages which don't have gnome2 equivalents: "doesn't work with gnome2". But, really, I don't see the technical side of this issue. All the "badness" is being confined to unstable, and it looks like the handling of the problems in unstable falls within our historical practices and guidelines. Or did I miss something? Can we fall back on 6.3.5 here? [That is: we're being asked to make a decision, but couldn't we be pushing back and asking for more detailed proposals?] Thanks, -- Raul
