Hi guys, First of all, I wanted to thank all the Debian maintainers of Gnome packages. You are doing a terrific job, keep it up!
I have been following the discussions on this list regarding whether it is a good idea to upload G2D to unstable replacing G1D, and I wanted to provide feedback from a user's point of view: on my computer at work I have been running the G2D packages through a unstable/experimental combination. I must say that I haven't had any problems at all with G2D, and I like it much better than G1D. Improvements like the ones in Nautilus and AA fonts made the switch really worth it. Of course, I am using some Gnome1 applications like Galeon, XChat, GnuCash, GHex, but they work fine with mixed Gnome1/Gnome2 libraries. Now, on my home computer I follow unstable, and there I didn't want to add "experimental" to my sources.list, so I put all the Gnome2 packages in unstable on hold (gnome-terminal, gnomemeeting, gnome-gv, etc.), but I will be migrating to Gnome2 once it is uploaded to unstable. The reason I have waited is that I don't want to use a mix of unstable/experimental packages on my home machine. This issue will disappear once G2D is in unstable. Regarding preferences, I couldn't care less about them. When I migrated at work from G1D to G2D I deleted the key directories (.gnome, .sawfish, .gconf, etc.) and started from scratch. I personally don't understand what the big deal with migrating user preferences is: it didn't take long to bring my new G2D environment to the way I had it in G1D. But that's just me, I understand other users might think different. Finally, I personally like the idea of having the Gnome2 packages replace the Gnome1 packages in unstable, i.e. no *2 packages. My reasons are: 1) Debian is already huge and bloating the archive more does no good. 2) unstable is where all this stuff should be happening. Want Gnome 1? Use testing, or better yet, Woody. If you follow unstable you must accept certain risks. We uploaded a CVS version of Samba pre-3.0 to unstable and lots of things broke, but if someone comes to me complaining I will tell him/her that we maintain the packages and we make the decisions (as Joe said), and that if they are not confortable with the breakage that happens from time to time in unstable they should *not* follow unstable, because it is, well, as the name implies, _unstable_. Just my .02 cents. Cheers, Eloy.-
