Not to mention there is serious doubts the the 3.8.0 release will be good enough to work properly for all endusers when the fallback is dropped, so it would need atleast a update to 3.8.x as a followup later to provide something that actually works, wich comes back to lack of maintainers...
I don't think Mageia providing GNOME 3.8 with the new classic mode made using extensions, rather than the old fall back mode, would cause loads of problems: http://worldofgnome.org/gnome-classic-not-classic-all/
Mageia doesn't have Unity for example which actually uses some things from the fall back mode, and as a result I think Ubuntu 13.04 staying with GNOME 3.6.2 rather than going 3.8 is a rather valid reason for them to do so.
Originally Mageia 3 was going to come out on March 20th, which caused an issue all along when it came to what GNOME version it would be released with, since GNOME 3.8 is scheduled for release on March 27th. However then the release scheduled changed to April 2nd/3rd and then once again to the 3rd of May. 3rd of May would actually provide enough time to get a GNOME 3.8 point release or two in there as well, as long as Olav or whoever is willing or able to package it does the work, and QA is willing to test it properly for example. Well I joined QA myself to test pre release ISO's with GNOME and such at times :). I know that in general people from the QA team, are quite willing to test out GNOME versions when it's time to test one, even if they don't personally use GNOME as their DE of choice.
Also KDE will be released with the latest stable final KDE version at the time of Mageia 3's release, so why not GNOME aswell? Also I thought that was the idea that both KDE and GNOME would get an exception for version freeze, so that Mageia could be released with the latest stable version at the time, of when the next Mageia version is going to be released?
Really the GNOME 3.8 proposal should be discussed again, and both myself and someone else from the QA team, think that the next council meeting which is scheduled for tommorow would be a good idea. Obviosuly Olav should be in such a disucssion if one is going to happen in the council or packagers meeting for example.
Personally I think in general it's a bad thing to release a distro with a over six months old version of a major upstream project such as GNOME or KDE, unless there is a proper valid reason to do so, such as the Ubuntu and Unity example.
