Re: Collaboration with Debian [was: Re: [Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review]
My intuition is that Ubuntu should definitely maintain its own GNOME stack. Since Unity is still largely based on GNOME technology but we may not agree every decision of GNOME upstream. And Debian's view point of GNOME upstream may different from us and they don't maintain Unity at all. But for things like texlive or rar should be mutually synchronized I guess. I don't think Debian or Ubuntu make a difference for such packages. I've shown my bad experience on texlive package. I'm working on rar package since it is in broken state for almost two years. For who sync who, I believe it is better to start with Debian if possible. It seems to me that Ubuntu has well established way of Debian sync while it is not the case in other direction. -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: [Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review
Le 16/10/2012 23:24, Robert Ancell a écrit : In conclusion I don't think we have anything to be worried about with GNOME OS at this point and by the time it did matter we may be sufficiently different anyway that it doesn't matter. Seems like GNOME OS is managing to get any discussion off-track, I shouldn't have used it there :p My point is mostly GNOME consider they should focus on their product on not downstream issues. I've heard speakers at GUADEC saying that GNOME shouldn't do compromises or efforts for distributors but that things should be the other way around ... distributors should make efforts for GNOME since their role is to distribute what upstream is doing. It's a fair statement but also a reality that shows, GNOME is less wanting to make efforts to accommodate distributors that it used to be (see how they manage transitions or hard/optional depends compared to how those were dealt with in the GNOME2 times) Cheers, Sebastien Bacher -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: [Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review
On 17/10/12 18:25, Allison Randal wrote: On 10/16/2012 03:56 PM, Robert Ancell wrote: My point is we *shouldn't* take the time to update Debian as it is all cost and no benefit. If you think of Debian as being directly upstream from Ubuntu it sounds good but in reality it is a more sidestream. If it is outdated in Ubuntu we should update it in Ubuntu and if Debian also wants the update they should merge our changes across as we do the other direction. The most appropriate person to decide if the changes are appropriate is a Debian developer, not an Ubuntu developer. No benefit is a pretty serious overstatement. Debian has ~2000 volunteer packagers who maintain the majority of packages available in Ubuntu, with automated imports. Ubuntu has ~200 volunteer packagers who mostly work with forward-porting small deltas to the Debian packages that can't be automatically merged, or making sure Ubuntu integrates the latest security fixes from Debian/upstream. And then there's a small set of packages that are custom to Ubuntu or heavily modified for Ubuntu. For this last set, I agree, it is more work to port the changes back to Debian, and the changes don't always make sense for Debian to apply. But, spending a bit of time considering Debian even for these odd packages is a small price to pay for the vast benefit we get from Debian overall. You probably spend most of your time in this last set of packages, so I understand where your perspective comes from. But, it's important to keep the wider context in mind. Allison Note that here we are discussing GNOME packages, though I would assert this statement is true for pretty much all the packages that make up the Ubuntu Desktop image (i.e. the packages that are most crucial to us). The time taken to ensure synchronisation and the additional work ensure those changes are in Debian has a non-significant cost but little to no benefit to us (because we are unlikely to ever be synchronised). The GNOME packages that are not on the image or any other package for that matter, sure, the majority of them come from Debian. And that is of great benefit to us. Iain's original statement was that since we can't be in sync with GNOME then we should try and be more in sync with Debian. And it's that I disagree with - there are no great GNOME packaging improvements flowing from Debian to Ubuntu and we should focus on making our packages high quality and updating them faster. If anyone wants to push our changes back into Debian or a Debian developer pull them that is a good thing but it should be done in parallel and not block our progress. --Robert -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: Collaboration with Debian [was: Re: [Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review]
On 17/10/12 18:02, Martin Pitt wrote: Robert Ancell [2012-10-17 10:48 +1300]: - By updating packages in Debian and waiting for them to flow down to Ubuntu kills our velocity. It can change the time from upstream release to being in Ubuntu from hours (which is too long in my opinion) to days. Yes, I agree that this is an issue at times. It usually works reasonably well for me to upload a new version to Debian and fakesync it into Ubuntu at the same time, but I have (1) DD upload powers and (2) everything set up to build packages for Debian, which is not true for the majority of Ubuntu Desktop developers. However, at the same time I strongly believe that directly working on Debian's packaging VCSes has some major benefits: Technically we avoid duplicate work and potential conflicts (such as naming new packages slightly differently, or a bug fix independently done on both sides works in a different way/with different API), and socially it's a great way of giving something back to Debian in return for having Debian do the vast majority of work of building Ubuntu. It also avoids the need of having to wade through large and mostly pointless merge deltas every so often, a work that nobody is really very fond of. Would an acceptable compromise be to commit fixes and new releases to Debian's GNOME svn, but then just do a -Nubuntu1 upload from those, at least for the packages which we want to keep in sync by and large? Martin I'm always hesitant to commit to a Debian repository since I don't run Debian my changes are never going to be tested properly. As you state, no-one likes to wade through the deltas and in my experience after doing that no real benefit is gained. The changes mostly come down to build-dependencies and addition/removal of patches (which are put into/come from upstream bug/git). It is faster to compare the upstream tarball changes than doing the merge from Debian. So what I suggest we do is admit merge bankruptcy. If the attempt to be in synchronisation is not bringing us more up to date or higher quality packages (I'll assert it's having the opposite effect) then we should stop trying to do it. Note of course this doesn't stop changes flowing back from Ubuntu to Debian if anyone wants to do that - we just shouldn't be using it as a criteria to judge the quality of our packages. --Robert -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: [Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review
Le 16/10/2012 06:08, Jeremy Bicha a écrit : On 15 October 2012 13:50, Sebastien Bacher seb...@ubuntu.com wrote: That's going to be a controversial topic but I want to suggest we stay on stable GNOME this cycle, the reasons are (in random order): Well you've been following GNOME development for longer than many of us. What is it that's making GNOME 3 releases more unstable than GNOME used to be? Is it just that GNOME development has sped up and the developers don't care enough about API stability? I think Seb is mentionning the in-cycle surprises we got recently, like the ibus change, and nautilus, which were not planned or announced before even we started to upgrade to the unstable .1 release. It's getting harder and harder to know what kind of changes will happen in the unstable serie for us, and so, it's difficult to build a strong quality product with all those unknown variables, knowing that we already planned our resources on some other ubuntu priorities for the cycles. - GNOME is not communicating early enough on what is coming for us to discuss next cycle at UDS (see nautilus 3.6 in quantal) - GNOME is shipping stables with transitions half done (see gstreamer 1.0 this cycle) which is not something we want in Ubuntu The other big example this cycle is ibus. GNOME 3.6 doesn't work properly without a not-released-as-stable version of ibus. http://pad.lv/1045914 - our feedback loop with GNOME is not really working nowadays, they don't have time to look at most bugs and we hit regressions and sit on them until somebody on our side has time to look at them, which means neither GNOME or us benefits much from tracking unstable GNOME... On the con side though: - it gives us less opportunity to work with upstream on resolving issues This will hurt GNOME some too as a decent amount of issues are reported first on Ubuntu. This will send some sort of message to GNOME but I'm not sure that there's much of a conversation happening though. In general, I think it would be a bad idea if we completely and permanently switched to shipping the old stable release instead of the latest stable release and the bug disconnect is one reason. From the way I see things, GNOME doesn't really support their stable releases much either. The final point release is only two months after the .0 release. Well, we still have to support older release like the LTS one for 5 years. If you feel that a release is only supported 2 months, shipping the latest will still give us only 2 months report, not 1 year and half for normal release. Knowing that we would directly ship with .3, this isn't a big change deal in term of support, but it's a big one in term of quality we can bring to our releases. - the new version of libraries might have APIs our app writers might want to use While maintaining the GTK milestones is a headache, it would also be a headache not to have them in Ubuntu. I don't think this strategy will really save much work. The GNOME milestone releases are likely to be packaged in a PPA any way. On the other hand, I got involved on the Desktop team because there was packaging work that needed to be done and the GNOME3 PPA made it seem like less of a hurdle to contribute to. I think most GNOME apps shouldn't cause any issues for the Ubuntu desktop. There are about 2 weeks from Alpha2 to Feature Freeze, and Alpha 2 approximately corresponds with the 3.7.5 release. By then, it should be clear which apps could cause problems and there is time to get the safe ones in. I don't really agree that it's not that much work. We tried this strategy for the LTS for instance, and it was still a lot of tweaks to do for it. One element to think about also is how that would impact the GNOME remix if the plan there is not ship the latest GNOME... Seb, I blame the remix idea on you. ;) Anyway, if the GNOME remix becomes an official flavor, I was hoping to then ask for permission to include the GNOME3 PPA due to our unique overlap with the flagship Ubuntu release. It's still a bit of a handicap as I don't think we could gain that trust if we included things that regressed Unity. If we don't fork ubuntu-control-center and ubuntu-settings-daemon off from gnome-control-center, then I don't believe it will be possible to ship GNOME Shell 3.7/3.8 next cycle. The last two cycles we've shipped the latest GNOME Shell but with bugs due to incomplete g-c-c/g-s-d support in Ubuntu (for 12.04 it was http://pad.lv/965921 with keyboard shortcuts not able to be configured from System Settings and for 12.10 it was 1045914 with a missing keyboard layout status menu). It's a reasonable guess that for 3.8, the GNOME developers will move aggressively to kill fallback mode and make optimizations and GNOME Shell will depend on those newer optimizations. A big reason for the GNOME remix is to show that you can contribute to GNOME from Ubuntu. I worry about what happens when most users are using a different distro than
Re: [Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review
Hiya, On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 07:50:04PM +0200, Sebastien Bacher wrote: Hey, That's a classic, we usually review our plans for GNOME for the next cycle. That's going to be a controversial topic but I want to suggest we stay on stable GNOME this cycle […] Ah, I think this is quite an interesting topic for us indeed. We don't seem to be getting any closer to GNOME, as indicated by the surprises you've pointed to. I wonder if we can fix/reduce that problem in future? Given the way that both projects are now design led, and the fact that it's design decisions / philosophies that are driving many of these difficulties, it would seem prudent for the respective design teams to try to work together a bit more closely. I wonder if we can facilitate something here, either at UDS depending on the people there or elsewhere. Also, will we have enough upstream guys at UDS to have a GNOME relationship healthcheck like we had before? Back to the initial proposal quoted above. My initial reaction was that I disliked it because my philosophy that I generally prefer to work as close to upstreams as possible so that we can have a more productive feedback loop when it comes to bugs and features. But it seems that perhaps this is slightly broken for us, so neither party is getting much benefit out of it. A benefit would be that tracking stable series lets us work more closely with our other big upstream, Debian. We might be able to reduce our deltas there quite a lot if we're tracking the same stuff. Cheers, -- Iain Lane [ i...@orangesquash.org.uk ] Debian Developer [ la...@debian.org ] Ubuntu Developer [ la...@ubuntu.com ] signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: [Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review
Le 16/10/2012 11:36, Iain Lane a écrit : Given the way that both projects are now design led, and the fact that it's design decisions / philosophies that are driving many of these difficulties, it would seem prudent for the respective design teams to try to work together a bit more closely. I wonder if we can facilitate something here, either at UDS depending on the people there or elsewhere. I don't think much of the issues we had this cycle were due to design though...do you have speaking design issues for quantal? (out of the fact that they design for different shells, and I don't think we should ask for Unity and G-S to have the same design, it's fair that different desktops take different decisions on e.g what to do with menus) GNOME rewriting their keyboard handling is just something we need time to catch up with. The other issues are mostly bugs, the fact that quality is not (yet) a focus for them as it is for us and the fact that they don't want to compromise on their decisions for the real world (or on distributor). Like when deciding for gstreamer they would care only for GNOME and ignore the fact that all distro ship e.g shotwell and rhythmbox and that those should be taken in account in the transition... The bottom line of the issue is that going to GNOME OS they are just not wanting to accommodate for classic distribution or downstream... Also, will we have enough upstream guys at UDS to have a GNOME relationship healthcheck like we had before? Not sure about enough, I'm sure Ryan Lortie will be happy to speak for GNOME there, not sure who else will be at UDS Back to the initial proposal quoted above. My initial reaction was that I disliked it because my philosophy that I generally prefer to work as close to upstreams as possible so that we can have a more productive feedback loop when it comes to bugs and features. But it seems that perhaps this is slightly broken for us, so neither party is getting much benefit out of it. A benefit would be that tracking stable series lets us work more closely with our other big upstream, Debian. We might be able to reduce our deltas there quite a lot if we're tracking the same stuff. Right, the Debian thing is a good point as well in fact. By shifting our focus and use the stable GNOME serie we might help upstream as well to solve the issue that was raised in other emails on the list that GNOME stable series are not maintained, not sure that GNOME is seeing that as an issue to be solved atm though but I'm sure it would benefit most users since at the end distributions do deliver stable GNOME versions to their users... Cheers, Sebastien Bacher -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: [Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review
Le 16/10/2012 06:08, Jeremy Bicha a écrit : On 15 October 2012 13:50, Sebastien Bacher seb...@ubuntu.com wrote: That's going to be a controversial topic but I want to suggest we stay on stable GNOME this cycle, the reasons are (in random order): Well you've been following GNOME development for longer than many of us. What is it that's making GNOME 3 releases more unstable than GNOME used to be? Is it just that GNOME development has sped up and the developers don't care enough about API stability? I think there a different factors there: - we never had great quality, Ubuntu is trying to address that and aim at better testing, less bugs, no regression, etc where GNOME didn't make that shift (yet?) - GNOME2 has been less dynamic than GNOME3 (at least the 2.n version during the Ubuntu time, which was not the start of the 2 serie, by then things were already settled down and in maintenance mode) which also made for less breakages - GNOME started to focus on GNOME OS and give less importance to what distributors think or do. It's a fair choice, they think they should better focus on building the best system they can do and should not compromise to accommodate others. I'm not even sure they see distributors as partners or if they just aim at deprecating those by shipping GNOME OS directly... This will hurt GNOME some too as a decent amount of issues are reported first on Ubuntu. This will send some sort of message to GNOME but I'm not sure that there's much of a conversation happening though. In general, I think it would be a bad idea if we completely and permanently switched to shipping the old stable release instead of the latest stable release and the bug disconnect is one reason. From the way I see things, GNOME doesn't really support their stable releases much either. The final point release is only two months after the .0 release. Well, maybe we can see that the other way around. If we ship the stable serie we will fix bugs there, so by side effect we actually help to make the stable serie maintained. It might be a good move for GNOME and its users (for sure having stable series better maintained is a win for everyone right? distributations are supported for years and there are going to be lot of users benefiting of that). While maintaining the GTK milestones is a headache, it would also be a headache not to have them in Ubuntu. I don't think this strategy will really save much work. The GNOME milestone releases are likely to be packaged in a PPA any way. Well, my issue is not packaging, it's the number of people who come to us complaining that we landed GTK regressions in Ubuntu and that stopped them in their work... that includes: - the people looking at the archive and build issues - the people writing software on/for Ubuntu (ask the software-center guys how much time they spend tracking issues with GTK) - the people dealing with library transitions (look at e-d-s in quantal, we ended up dropping e.g evolution-indicator from the archive because we couldn't find somebody who could keep up with the changes) If we were just landing a new glib,GTK serie at the start of the cycle we would still have issues, but likely less of those (stable GTK ought to have less regressions than unstable versions leading to stable right?) and we would have them at the start of the cycle (where at the moment we often still fight new GTK regressions around beta1 and beta2 time...). It's somewhat similar to the toolchain in my opinion. On the other hand, I got involved on the Desktop team because there was packaging work that needed to be done and the GNOME3 PPA made it seem like less of a hurdle to contribute to. I think most GNOME apps shouldn't cause any issues for the Ubuntu desktop. There are about 2 weeks from Alpha2 to Feature Freeze, and Alpha 2 approximately corresponds with the 3.7.5 release. By then, it should be clear which apps could cause problems and there is time to get the safe ones in. Right, most apps are fine (they sometime turn out to be problematic, the new file-roller this cycle being an example, upstream rewrote quite some code and it has been really buggy since), the issue is that GNOME has a tendency to get everything depending on the last glib,GTK versions, so it somewhat forces us to update those... One element to think about also is how that would impact the GNOME remix if the plan there is not ship the latest GNOME... Seb, I blame the remix idea on you. ;) Heh, fair enough ;-) I'm glad you picked the idea and I wished things were easier to work out there that they are at the moment... Anyway, if the GNOME remix becomes an official flavor, I was hoping to then ask for permission to include the GNOME3 PPA due to our unique overlap with the flagship Ubuntu release. It's still a bit of a handicap as I don't think we could gain that trust if we included things that regressed Unity. Right. Is there any reason we think GNOME remix
Re: [Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review
On 12-10-16 05:47 AM, Sebastien Bacher wrote: - GNOME started to focus on GNOME OS and give less importance to what distributors think or do. It's a fair choice, they think they should better focus on building the best system they can do and should not compromise to accommodate others. I'm not even sure they see distributors as partners or if they just aim at deprecating those by shipping GNOME OS directly... Whoa whoa whoa... I never hear about Fedora or SuSE having these clashes with GNOME. Are you sure the problem is really with GNOME and not with us? Maybe this problem isn't GNOME doesn't cooperate with distributions but rather Canonical doesn't cooperate with GNOME. Just a thought. I would like to see better cooperation, personally ;-) Also, last I heard, 'GNOME OS' is not intended to obsolete distros, it is intended to obsolete jhbuild as a way for developers to hack on the absolute-cutting-edge-git-snapshots of GNOME. -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: [Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review
On 16 October 2012 14:14, Robert Bruce Park robert.p...@canonical.com wrote: Also, last I heard, 'GNOME OS' is not intended to obsolete distros, it is intended to obsolete jhbuild as a way for developers to hack on the absolute-cutting-edge-git-snapshots of GNOME. The GNOME OS discussion in Boston was pretty much a talk about jhbuild and ostree. If that's all GNOME OS is, then they really don't know how to pick project names. It seems that GNOME OS means a bunch of different, not really related things and badly needs a formal definition. Jeremy -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: [Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review
Le 16/10/2012 20:14, Robert Bruce Park a écrit : Whoa whoa whoa... I never hear about Fedora or SuSE having these clashes with GNOME. Are you sure the problem is really with GNOME and not with us? Maybe this problem isn't GNOME doesn't cooperate with distributions but rather Canonical doesn't cooperate with GNOME. Did you hear about Ubuntu having these clashes with GNOME? I don't think we had strong public disagreements but it doesn' mean we don't have an opinion on how things are doing. I'm sure other distribution have similar issues (at least Debian has, from what I can tell by being on their channels and following their discussions). OpenSUSE is also not strictly following GNOME since they have a different release schedule. I've seen several discussions on the Gentoo side about issues with GNOME choices and how it impacts them recently as well. Sure Fedora doesn't have such issues, at the same time their focus is on shipping the current code from $upstream, they do target hackers and enthusiast users rather than enterprises and consumers, and most of GNOME hackers work for Redhat... -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: [Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review
Le 16/10/2012 20:14, Robert Bruce Park a écrit : Just a thought. I would like to see better cooperation, personally ;-) Right, I think we all do and ideas on how to improve cooperation are welcome ;-) Also, last I heard, 'GNOME OS' is not intended to obsolete distros, it is intended to obsolete jhbuild as a way for developers to hack on the absolute-cutting-edge-git-snapshots of GNOME. Well, I'm not sure what GNOME OS is about since there is a lack of definition for it and disagreement between groups of people. I've been to GUADEC though and I've been people on stage saying that GNOME should stop paying attention to distribution and their issue but focus on delivering a product. That's fair, mozilla doesn't look at distributors to define their reschedule schedule, freeze or whatever. That's a change in the relationship between GNOME and their distributors though and worth noting. GNOME also doesn't has the firefox brand and while mozilla can enforce their ways I'm not sure it's the case of GNOME... -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: [Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review
On 16/10/12 23:47, Sebastien Bacher wrote: Le 16/10/2012 06:08, Jeremy Bicha a écrit : On 15 October 2012 13:50, Sebastien Bacher seb...@ubuntu.com wrote: That's going to be a controversial topic but I want to suggest we stay on stable GNOME this cycle, the reasons are (in random order): Well you've been following GNOME development for longer than many of us. What is it that's making GNOME 3 releases more unstable than GNOME used to be? Is it just that GNOME development has sped up and the developers don't care enough about API stability? I think there a different factors there: - we never had great quality, Ubuntu is trying to address that and aim at better testing, less bugs, no regression, etc where GNOME didn't make that shift (yet?) - GNOME2 has been less dynamic than GNOME3 (at least the 2.n version during the Ubuntu time, which was not the start of the 2 serie, by then things were already settled down and in maintenance mode) which also made for less breakages - GNOME started to focus on GNOME OS and give less importance to what distributors think or do. It's a fair choice, they think they should better focus on building the best system they can do and should not compromise to accommodate others. I'm not even sure they see distributors as partners or if they just aim at deprecating those by shipping GNOME OS directly... From what I have gathered GNOME OS is a number of things: - It's about standardising the stack from the kernel to the applications. This is mostly a non-issue for Ubuntu as the stack that is being standardised on is pretty much what we have in Ubuntu. There is a mismatch if GNOME standardises on systemd and we continue with upstart, but from what I understand about the technical differences the issues are being exaggerated and it is not something we can't solve. - It's about making GNOME testable [1]. It has been (correctly) identified that through distributors GNOME cannot ensure a consistent experience. In advisor board discussions at GUADEC it was suggested that perhaps the GNOME OS term should be dropped and Testable used instead due to the confusion surrounding GNOME OS. Testable is obviously a great thing for Ubuntu in that it will hopefully improve quality (so Seb GNOME is making that shift now) and allow people to run the Vanilla GNOME at any point. - Part of standardising the stack is increasing the scope of what GNOME is. So there's experimentation going on around packaging and user feedback which is the bread and butter of the traditional distributions. This seems like it could be a challenge for us, but it's too early to see where these experiments are going. - There's a logical conclusion that once you have Testable complete then that is a distribution. I get the impression that this is what some people want to go to but I've heard no actual strategy on how this will be a success for GNOME. I think this idea is built on the naive idea that you build the perfect OS the users will come. It would be suicide for GNOME to ruin their current distributor relationships at this point unless there was a strong chance of this succeeding and I haven't seen anything close to that. In conclusion I don't think we have anything to be worried about with GNOME OS at this point and by the time it did matter we may be sufficiently different anyway that it doesn't matter. --Robert [1] https://live.gnome.org/GnomeOS/Testable -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: [Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review
On 16/10/12 22:36, Iain Lane wrote: Given the way that both projects are now design led, and the fact that it's design decisions / philosophies that are driving many of these difficulties, it would seem prudent for the respective design teams to try to work together a bit more closely. I wonder if we can facilitate something here, either at UDS depending on the people there or elsewhere. It would be good to keep communication lines open here. I don't think there's going to be any meaningful Unity influence on GNOME as their focus is on things working with GNOME but we need to make sure that GNOME apps can work effectively in Ubuntu by making Unity handle them correctly. In terms of Ubuntu Design wanting to modify GNOME packages we do have to go to GNOME first as it's unsustainable to make the changes with Ubuntu engineering and then expect them to go upstream easily. Back to the initial proposal quoted above. My initial reaction was that I disliked it because my philosophy that I generally prefer to work as close to upstreams as possible so that we can have a more productive feedback loop when it comes to bugs and features. But it seems that perhaps this is slightly broken for us, so neither party is getting much benefit out of it. A benefit would be that tracking stable series lets us work more closely with our other big upstream, Debian. We might be able to reduce our deltas there quite a lot if we're tracking the same stuff. I really question the idea that Debian is an upstream to us in the traditional sense. I see Debian as more of a sidestream project that we can transfer work between. Things that I think are bad about our close dependency on Debian: - We have wildly different release schedules and quality standards which means packages are constantly diverging - By updating packages in Debian and waiting for them to flow down to Ubuntu kills our velocity. It can change the time from upstream release to being in Ubuntu from hours (which is too long in my opinion) to days. - Debian carries a number of patches that have no relevance to Ubuntu (e.g. Hurd patches). This just complicates the packaging. - By leaving some packages to be fully maintained by Debian we easily end up shipping old packages without noticing it. I was quite shocked when I updated the version tracker [1] how many out of date packages we ship. If we're going to ship a quality product we really should be more aware of the code we ship. I don't think any of the above is likely to change at any point so I think the best way of reducing the delta is to not have a delta on our core packages (i.e. don't try and be in sync at all). The current work to be in sync is not really benefiting us or Debian and the more important upstream is the software author not Debian. Where we do need to be in sync: - Platform behaviour (e.g. library compatibility) so Universe continues to work (though I hope Universe will disappear at some point nullifying this). - Package naming. This is a problem that's getting worse not better with extras.ubuntu.com and the like. --Robert [1] http://people.canonical.com/~platform/desktop/versions.html -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: [Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review
On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 4:48 PM, Robert Ancell robert.anc...@canonical.com wrote: - By updating packages in Debian and waiting for them to flow down to Ubuntu kills our velocity. It can change the time from upstream release to being in Ubuntu from hours (which is too long in my opinion) to days. In most cases, it just goes to the latest Ubuntu release. Users of older releases can help themselves or wanting for a (not always good) PPA. Longer supporting cycle, especially LTS releases, is really one of the advantage of Ubuntu. But the support is not that good, consider 10.04 today or 12.04 two years later. - By leaving some packages to be fully maintained by Debian we easily end up shipping old packages without noticing it. I was quite shocked when I updated the version tracker [1] how many out of date packages we ship. If we're going to ship a quality product we really should be more aware of the code we ship. The page you mentioned is nice. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. If a Ubuntu contributor/developer find something outdated in Debian, she should help Debian as well as Ubuntu. If you want a more updated upstream, consider Arch? -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: [Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review
On 17/10/12 11:28, Ma Xiaojun wrote: - By leaving some packages to be fully maintained by Debian we easily end up shipping old packages without noticing it. I was quite shocked when I updated the version tracker [1] how many out of date packages we ship. If we're going to ship a quality product we really should be more aware of the code we ship. The page you mentioned is nice. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. If a Ubuntu contributor/developer find something outdated in Debian, she should help Debian as well as Ubuntu. If you want a more updated upstream, consider Arch? My point is we *shouldn't* take the time to update Debian as it is all cost and no benefit. If you think of Debian as being directly upstream from Ubuntu it sounds good but in reality it is a more sidestream. If it is outdated in Ubuntu we should update it in Ubuntu and if Debian also wants the update they should merge our changes across as we do the other direction. The most appropriate person to decide if the changes are appropriate is a Debian developer, not an Ubuntu developer. We don't need to switch from Debian to Arch as we don't need any particular packaging. If you look at the versions page you see we already maintain the majority of packages in Ubuntu anyway. -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: [Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review
On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 5:56 PM, Robert Ancell robert.anc...@canonical.com wrote: My point is we *shouldn't* take the time to update Debian as it is all cost and no benefit. If you think of Debian as being directly upstream from Ubuntu it sounds good but in reality it is a more sidestream. If it is outdated in Ubuntu we should update it in Ubuntu and if Debian also wants the update they should merge our changes across as we do the other direction. The most appropriate person to decide if the changes are appropriate is a Debian developer, not an Ubuntu developer. Do you mean main or universe? I have an example, TeX Live, which is quite important for academic people and some others. http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=texlivesearchon=namessuite=allsection=main It is in main section. ( I thought it is in universe section) From the link, you should easily see that it stuck on 2009 version since Lucid. And the version bumps to 2012 in Quantal. For sure there is a bug and now marked as Fix Released since 2012 is uploaded to Quantal. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/texlive-base/+bug/712521 Note this comment from a Debian developer, what's your comment on this? https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/texlive-base/+bug/712521/comments/70 We don't need to switch from Debian to Arch as we don't need any particular packaging. If you look at the versions page you see we already maintain the majority of packages in Ubuntu anyway. Sounds like you mean more and more packages are going to main. And we just need to take care of ourselves. I'm not convinced, though. The first thing is the experience from TeX Live gives little confidence on main packages. The second thing is that the documentation is still recommending go through Debian and then sync to Ubuntu. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopment/NewPackages I've filed need-packaging, upgrade-software-version bugs several times. The ridiculous thing for me is that I always find myself reports duplicated RFP bugs on Debian side. And I never get interesting reply from Ubuntu side. -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: [Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review
Robert Ancell [2012-10-17 10:24 +1300]: - It's about standardising the stack from the kernel to the applications. Right, that was mostly what I've heard about the idea as well. This is mostly a non-issue for Ubuntu as the stack that is being standardised on is pretty much what we have in Ubuntu. We deviate quite far already, using upstart, ConsoleKit, and upower, while GNOME moves towards systemd. As you said, none of this is insurmountable (it just comes with an ever-increasing maintenance cost), but it certainly invalidates the upstream testing that this would bring up to some degree, especially in areas like settings-daemon and control-center. But we can solve that by running all of upstream's tests (both automatic and manual) on our own again. - There's a logical conclusion that once you have Testable complete then that is a distribution. I get the impression that this is what some people want to go to but I've heard no actual strategy on how this will be a success for GNOME. I don't think this will happen anytime soon. Anyone who says that seriously underestimates what a distribution does and entails (stuff that other people do is always easy). I don't have the impression that most GNOME upstream devs want to carry the burden of supporting several releases over years, providing security fixes, maintaining and installer, preparing and testing images, doing user support, and all that (that doesn't even begin to scratch the areas that Canonical does very well, such as custom engineering or building relationships with driver vendors). The pragmatic solution will probably be to declare Fedora as the GNOME reference platform, which in a way it already is anyway. In conclusion I don't think we have anything to be worried about with GNOME OS at this point and by the time it did matter we may be sufficiently different anyway that it doesn't matter. I agree. I for one appreciate the practical efforts that have been made in this area, such as OSTree. It's a very nice basis for doing continuous integration testing on a standardized, and hot off plumbing git master of current git master GNOME, and will hopefully lead to a lot more robust upstream development process, as well as allowing developers to easily reproduce bugs on the standard stack locally. Martin -- Martin Pitt| http://www.piware.de Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com) | Debian Developer (www.debian.org) -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Collaboration with Debian [was: Re: [Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review]
Robert Ancell [2012-10-17 10:48 +1300]: - By updating packages in Debian and waiting for them to flow down to Ubuntu kills our velocity. It can change the time from upstream release to being in Ubuntu from hours (which is too long in my opinion) to days. Yes, I agree that this is an issue at times. It usually works reasonably well for me to upload a new version to Debian and fakesync it into Ubuntu at the same time, but I have (1) DD upload powers and (2) everything set up to build packages for Debian, which is not true for the majority of Ubuntu Desktop developers. However, at the same time I strongly believe that directly working on Debian's packaging VCSes has some major benefits: Technically we avoid duplicate work and potential conflicts (such as naming new packages slightly differently, or a bug fix independently done on both sides works in a different way/with different API), and socially it's a great way of giving something back to Debian in return for having Debian do the vast majority of work of building Ubuntu. It also avoids the need of having to wade through large and mostly pointless merge deltas every so often, a work that nobody is really very fond of. Would an acceptable compromise be to commit fixes and new releases to Debian's GNOME svn, but then just do a -Nubuntu1 upload from those, at least for the packages which we want to keep in sync by and large? Martin -- Martin Pitt| http://www.piware.de Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com) | Debian Developer (www.debian.org) -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
[Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review
Hey, That's a classic, we usually review our plans for GNOME for the next cycle. That's going to be a controversial topic but I want to suggest we stay on stable GNOME this cycle, the reasons are (in random order): - tracking unstable GNOME is taking lot of resources that we don't invest in our desktop (packaging a new stack every 3 weeks, dealing with transitions, regressions, etc) - our desktop is quite less stock GNOME than it used to be, which means we have extra integration work to do and it's less trivial to do those on the way during the cycle - GNOME unstable series and Ubuntu working every day are hard to conciliate goals - GNOME is not communicating early enough on what is coming for us to discuss next cycle at UDS (see nautilus 3.6 in quantal) - GNOME is shipping stables with transitions half done (see gstreamer 1.0 this cycle) which is not something we want in Ubuntu - our feedback loop with GNOME is not really working nowadays, they don't have time to look at most bugs and we hit regressions and sit on them until somebody on our side has time to look at them, which means neither GNOME or us benefits much from tracking unstable GNOME... On the con side though: - it gives us less opportunity to work with upstream on resolving issues - we don't get early feedback on what is happening - the new version of libraries might have APIs our app writers might want to use Comments? Seb -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: [Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review
Le 15/10/2012 19:50, Sebastien Bacher a écrit : - the new version of libraries might have APIs our app writers might want to use On that I would note that we should keep a ppa for the unstable serie packages, open to contributions. Most app writer do want to target users of stable users out there anyway and will probably not want to jump on using the latest apis added. I've to say I'm not convinced we shouldn't update the libraries yet, they should be ok to track though they are also the elements the most likely to create issues for other people working on the distribution (think ftbfses introduced by gtk deprecations). One element to think about also is how that would impact the GNOME remix if the plan there is not ship the latest GNOME... Cheers, Sebastien Bacher -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: [Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review
I'm a fan of this for quality reasons. Shipping very latest GNOME used to give Ubuntu a cutting edge feel, but nowadays, shiny new Ubuntu features tend to come from Unity and friends. The interesting new user-facing changes that GNOME brings are (mostly) in Shell. So I don't think the default Ubuntu image would lose much in terms of staying relevant by sticking to stable GNOME releases. That said, the GNOME Remix would have a much harder time feeling cutting edge. -mt On 15/10/12 13:50, Sebastien Bacher wrote: Hey, That's a classic, we usually review our plans for GNOME for the next cycle. That's going to be a controversial topic but I want to suggest we stay on stable GNOME this cycle, the reasons are (in random order): - tracking unstable GNOME is taking lot of resources that we don't invest in our desktop (packaging a new stack every 3 weeks, dealing with transitions, regressions, etc) - our desktop is quite less stock GNOME than it used to be, which means we have extra integration work to do and it's less trivial to do those on the way during the cycle - GNOME unstable series and Ubuntu working every day are hard to conciliate goals - GNOME is not communicating early enough on what is coming for us to discuss next cycle at UDS (see nautilus 3.6 in quantal) - GNOME is shipping stables with transitions half done (see gstreamer 1.0 this cycle) which is not something we want in Ubuntu - our feedback loop with GNOME is not really working nowadays, they don't have time to look at most bugs and we hit regressions and sit on them until somebody on our side has time to look at them, which means neither GNOME or us benefits much from tracking unstable GNOME... On the con side though: - it gives us less opportunity to work with upstream on resolving issues - we don't get early feedback on what is happening - the new version of libraries might have APIs our app writers might want to use Comments? Seb -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: [Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review
On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 11:08 PM, Jeremy Bicha jbi...@ubuntu.com wrote: The other big example this cycle is ibus. GNOME 3.6 doesn't work properly without a not-released-as-stable version of ibus. http://pad.lv/1045914 Have you contacted with IBus upstream? Developers of IBus are mostly using Fedora, which ships 1.4.99 since Fedora 17. We all know that IBus 1.4 on Unity is broken. But in fact IBus 1.4 on GNOME 3.4 (Precise) is not much better, the tray icon constantly flashes. I've been using a PPA for patched ibus-gjs for one of my 12.04 box. Official ibus-gjs doesn't work on precise, probably due to IBus version reason. The point is, you've been far behind on IBus stuff for long. -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: [Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review
On 16/10/12 15:08, Jeremy Bicha wrote: One element to think about also is how that would impact the GNOME remix if the plan there is not ship the latest GNOME... Seb, I blame the remix idea on you. ;) Anyway, if the GNOME remix becomes an official flavor, I was hoping to then ask for permission to include the GNOME3 PPA due to our unique overlap with the flagship Ubuntu release. It's still a bit of a handicap as I don't think we could gain that trust if we included things that regressed Unity. If we don't fork ubuntu-control-center and ubuntu-settings-daemon off from gnome-control-center, then I don't believe it will be possible to ship GNOME Shell 3.7/3.8 next cycle. The last two cycles we've shipped the latest GNOME Shell but with bugs due to incomplete g-c-c/g-s-d support in Ubuntu (for 12.04 it was http://pad.lv/965921 with keyboard shortcuts not able to be configured from System Settings and for 12.10 it was 1045914 with a missing keyboard layout status menu). It's a reasonable guess that for 3.8, the GNOME developers will move aggressively to kill fallback mode and make optimizations and GNOME Shell will depend on those newer optimizations. A big reason for the GNOME remix is to show that you can contribute to GNOME from Ubuntu. I worry about what happens when most users are using a different distro than most developers. Shipping an outdated GNOME means that we have a much less compelling story to tell these developers. Jeremy Whatever happens I think its important to maintain compatibility between Unity and Gnome-shell. It would be terrible to end up back where we were at 18months ago where installing gnome-shell (from the ppa) broke everything else. Tim -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
