Hi! I've performed some tests of partial upgrades from GNOME 2.6 to GNOME 2.8 in experimental.
I tried to upgrade one component at a time, and once that was done, I logged out of GNOME, restarted GDM, and killed the GNOME user processes that could be temporarily laying around (bonobo-activation, gnome-keyring...). After logging into GNOME again, I tried to start the applications that usually show problems quite fast (gedit, nautilus, etc). In some cases, before upgrading a lib I tested for pending shlib bumps. The results unveiled two cases of slightly outdated shlibs, and a few -common/-data packages that are not updated. The former have been fixed in SVN already, and the latter isn't even a bug in some cases, in other cases it just means the translations are not completely up to date, but no grave functionality regression. The GNOME system always worked ok when logging in after each iteration. I upgraded stuff in this order: libbonobo2 gconf2 gnome-vfs2+eel2+nautilus (eel2-data not updated) (double clicking in nautilus stuff doesn't open the applications due to the MIME transition until the apps involved don't get upgraded) gedit libpanel-applet2-0 libgnome2-0 gnome-session gnome-keyring evolution gnome-canvas cappets+gnome-control-center+gnome-icon+theme gnome-desktop-data gnome-about libgnomeui libwnck (libwnck-common not updated) gnome-panel gnome-applets libgnome-desktop (outdated shlibs) libgnomeprintui (outdated shlibs, -common not updated) gnome-terminal At this point, only normal plain apps were left for upgrade. The core of GNOME was working ok in every step. Other tests using different combinations would be welcome, maybe not step by step. Just adding experimental and doing "apt-get install gnome-applets", to see how it goes, would be ok, and same for big stuff like nautilus, etc. Jordi