Re: Staying on GTK/GNOME 3.8 next cycle/for the LTS?
On 13-10-02 05:25 AM, Adam Dingle wrote: On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 4:22 PM, Sebastien Bacher seb...@ubuntu.com wrote: Le 01/10/2013 21:16, Adam Dingle a écrit : I've used Ubuntu every day for 7 years and am active in the GNOME community. The fact that Ubuntu lags one release behind GNOME is already a significant burden for me. I often spend time building the newest version of GNOME apps, which can be challenging since Ubuntu's libraries lag behind. If Ubuntu stays with 3.8 for Saucy+1 (i.e. starts to lag two releases behind GNOME), I'd quite possibly switch to Fedora or Debian. Staying with 3.8 could be fine for most users, especially if Canonical wants to focus most of its energy on phones and tablets. But for anyone who wants to use the latest GNOME apps and especially anyone who wants to contribute to GNOME development, two releases back is just too much. adam Hey Adam, I'm sorry to read that Ubuntu being behind on GNOME releases is a burden for you :/ Can I ask if that's the opinion of an user, or from a developer wanting to contribute to GNOME? I'm somewhere between those, but actually more of a user. In other words, I report a lot of bugs and like to comment on the very latest features, but don't make many code contributions myself. There's a continuous spectrum from users to power users to developers, and I think in a healthy software ecosystem they can all run the same codebase. Suppose that developers are running release A and users are all running release B. The greater the distance in time between A and B, the harder it is to get a useful feedback loop from users to developers (and vice versa). I think Ubuntu's lag behind the latest GNOME has contributed to the feeling of separation between the Ubuntu and GNOME communities, for better or for worse. The closer we stay with upstream GNOME, the more the desktop ships with stuff that is simply broken and doesn't work properly because of lack to time to get all the integration and bug polishing done. As a user, are you willing to sacrifice a nice, polished, desktop with few bugs to be able to get a more bleeding edge GNOME? Anyway, I know I may not be a completely typical Ubuntu user. The deeper story here is that it feels like Ubuntu is slowly separating from GNOME, and lagging 2 releases behind GNOME (for the first time ever in Ubuntu's history, I believe) may just be the next step in that process. Lagging behind for stability reasons for an LTS doesn't mean we're separating from GNOME. It just means we want our LTS to be rock-solid by concentrating effort on fixing all the nagging bugs in a stable code base instead of spending all our time fixing everything that breaks from using the latest version. Latest release and buggy, or lagging behind and rock solid. Pick one. Marc. -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: Staying on GTK/GNOME 3.8 next cycle/for the LTS?
Le 02/10/2013 13:45, Tim a écrit : That was a mistake, the commits/bugs all refered to GTK2 so I figured it wouldnt be a problem. Well, that patch was maybe a mistake, but GTK 3.10 still drops support for those options: https://git.gnome.org/browse/gtk+/log/?qt=grepq=Deprecate+and+ignore So those are going to stop working the day we update GTK... Cheers, Sebastien Bacher -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: Staying on GTK/GNOME 3.8 next cycle/for the LTS?
Le 02/10/2013 01:45, Tim a écrit : Either way some concerns I have - Ubuntu will keep holding back on GNOME updates until QML/Touch stack is ready and then just dump it That's not going to be the case, I think that staying one release behind is a fair tradeoff and that we should keep doing that. One reason for the stronger pushback on the update is that, in my opinion, we should hold back on controversial changes for the LTS. If we get some hit, from unhappy users, after the LTS that's fine ... they can stay on the LTS or we have time address those during the next LTS cycle. Transitioning from 3.8 - 3.12 would likely be a big nightmare, also if we end up with a 2 cycle divergance, mixing packages from different releases will become much harder than it already is. The transition shouldn't be harder, it's basically: - update the libs (they are api/abi compatible so it's fine) - update the apps - update the components like g-s-d/g-c-c in sync That shouldn't be more complex that usually, especially if the patch rebasing work happening in a ppa during that cycle - We will most likely need to transition ubuntu GNOME to wayland at some point, however we can't really even start on that in an experimental capacity until 3.10 is in the archives. Even if Ubuntu was going to go for wayland (which is not likely the case, at least for Unity), that's enough changes that it wouldn't happen before the coming LTS. It makes sense to start those sort of transition at the beginning of a LTS cycle... - There are a number of major bugs we have on the PPA's that are really outside of our scope to fix, but as long as they are PPA only packages, no one cares to help fixing them. Things like the Software Center crash with updated Webkit plus a few new issues introduced with 3.10 such as unity custom menus in GTK and the DisplayConfig needing to be implemented in Unity. I don't think that's true, and that's another reason for not wanting to go with the update. Those bugs don't get ignored because they are in the ppa, they are not addressed because nobody has spare cycle to work on those. Landing the update in the archive would lead to a situation where you would increase the stress level on people who are overworked already, and wouldn't get half the bugs looked at anyway in return. It's a no-win situation for everyone... - Its really unlikely that we will be able to track 3.12 on a 3.8 base, we mostly get away with 3.10 since some of the core libraries in Saucy did get updated to 3.10 versions, however there are packages we simply can't package on the PPA's such as glib, gvfs, cogl/clutter etc due the massive list of rdepends. Right now we have had to revert a huge number of patches just to get gnome-shell 3.10 running on Saucy. Right, that's one cycle only though, I don't think it would be the end of the world to hold back for another cycle, knowing that the net benefit is better stability for our users - If the PPA's end up a cycle behind and there is complete lack of wayland support, we will likely start loosing users to Fedora etc. To be honest I fail to see running on wayland as a something users want. Especially that the current goal is to reach parity. If things go perfectly, the next GNOME version is going to run as well on wayland that it is on xorg. It's going to be a win for the future, but probably not something that makes any day to day difference to users. By the time GNOME on wayland is ready, the LTS is going to be out. Sure, it might be an issue for some tech users who want to be on top of the most recent changes, but I don't think they are the primary target of a LTS version... Cheers, Sebastien Bacher -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: Staying on GTK/GNOME 3.8 next cycle/for the LTS?
Le 02/10/2013 11:25, Adam Dingle a écrit : Right. I'm not concerned about specific features from GNOME 3.10 as much as staying closer to the upstream codebase so that developers and users can work together. That's an understable position, the reality though is that we are trying to stay close from the Ubuntu user base and not so much from the GNOME one (Unity and GNOME are pretty much different experience nowadays). The fact that Ubuntu/Unity still relies on GNOME components is making harder to give a GNOME experience close from upstream on Ubuntu at the moment. That's not going to change before the next LTS, but in the future Ubuntu should be a ble to provide a first class experience both for Unity users and GNOME users (having less interactions should mean less frictions between the desktops, and more flexibility for GNOME to be closer from upstream on Ubuntu) Cheers, Sebastien Bacher -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: Staying on GTK/GNOME 3.8 next cycle/for the LTS?
Hi to all, I personally think staying at GNOME 3.8 would not be a great decision. In my opinion Ubuntu is starting to turn into a Redhat. I think it used to be the leader in the latest and greatest in the community of free and open source software, and ever since a majority of canonical has been tasked with touch TODO's it seems more and more scared of continuing the path with the latest and greatest. This seems true for the desktop team as well. GNOME has already released a stable 3.10 and has already started on 3.12. The work that seemed to go into going from 3.6 to 3.8 this cycle seemed to happen early and was minimal compared to what's been going on with the touch stuff. I'm not going to claim to know what workload is entailed with going to 3.10 next cycle, but what drew me into Ubuntu in the first place was that it wasn't afraid to have the latest and greatest software available to all desktop users. I hope that we don't lose that great aspect of Ubuntu just because the work entailed from touch tasks is taking over your time. Thanks, ~Brian Curtis On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Sebastien Bacher seb...@ubuntu.com wrote: Hey everyone, I know this cycle is not finished yet, but in case some of us start thinking about next cycle, I wanted to start a discussion on the GNOME version to use for the lts. I think we should stick with GNOME 3.8 another cycle, here are the reasons why: - we (Ubuntu Desktop) are currently mostly happy with what we have - the focus for the Ubuntu Desktop team is likely to continue to be Ubuntu Touch/phone next cycle - due to the previous factor, we are going to be limited in resources to do desktop work - it's a LTS cycle, we should focus on bugs fixing if possible - GTK 3.10 deprecates several options, it would be good to stay away from those controverses for the LTS (see https://launchpad.net/bugs/**1228886https://launchpad.net/bugs/1228886as an example of what is going to happen once we deprecate those options) - it seems like the next RedHat enterprise edition is going to be based on GNOME 3.8, if that's the case it would make sense for us to focus on bringing quality to the same version/share the maintainance work a bit What do other things? I guess the Ubuntu GNOME Remix is going to want newer version, we should try to accomodate that need if we can. One way would be to do the fork of gnome-control-center we have been talking about for a while. Blocking GTK to 3.8 is likely to make hard to update GNOME components anyway, if we decide to go this way... What do others think? Cheers, Sebastien Bacher -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.**com ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/**mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-**desktophttps://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop -- = Ubuntu Member: http://launchpad.net/~bcurtiswx Freenode IRC: BCurtisWX Ubuntu Wiki: http://wiki.ubuntu.com/BCurtisWX Ubuntu District of Columbia LoCo: http://dc.ubuntu-us.org/ GNOME3 Team: http://launchpad.net/~gnome3-team Ubuntu Bug Control Team: http://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-bugcontrol = -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: Staying on GTK/GNOME 3.8 next cycle/for the LTS?
I see where you're coming from and I don't want to take up much of anyone's time, but I can't help but worry about an impending integration nightmare as you continue to dawdle with GNOME's APIs. Do we know what is going to happen with Ubuntu-specific system utilities with 14.10 and Unity 8? In particular, I'm curious about Software Centre / Updater, Ubuntu One, Startup Disk Creator, Jockey and Ubuntu Online Accounts. Incidentally, those are quite central to Ubuntu. Arguably more so than the Unity shell, itself. Are these going to be replaced with new-style applications built on the Ubuntu SDK, or are we hanging on to them for a while? If the latter, how long do we expect to go on with GUIs that were basically built for GNOME 2 running under Unity and (an increasingly out of date) GNOME 3.x? What does this mean for Unity's compatibility with modern GNOME 3 applications, or for anyone who still wants to run GNOME 3.12 in Ubuntu? As I see it, the more you dawdle with GNOME's APIs, the more those core applications which are built on them are going to bit-rot, and while several of them already seem clunky and weird, at some point you'll have a real problem bringing them up to date without some serious, expensive, and potentially very rushed, rewriting. -- Dylan On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 10:45 AM, Sebastien Bacher seb...@ubuntu.com wrote: Hey everyone, I know this cycle is not finished yet, but in case some of us start thinking about next cycle, I wanted to start a discussion on the GNOME version to use for the lts. I think we should stick with GNOME 3.8 another cycle, here are the reasons why: - we (Ubuntu Desktop) are currently mostly happy with what we have - the focus for the Ubuntu Desktop team is likely to continue to be Ubuntu Touch/phone next cycle - due to the previous factor, we are going to be limited in resources to do desktop work - it's a LTS cycle, we should focus on bugs fixing if possible - GTK 3.10 deprecates several options, it would be good to stay away from those controverses for the LTS (see https://launchpad.net/bugs/**1228886https://launchpad.net/bugs/1228886as an example of what is going to happen once we deprecate those options) - it seems like the next RedHat enterprise edition is going to be based on GNOME 3.8, if that's the case it would make sense for us to focus on bringing quality to the same version/share the maintainance work a bit What do other things? I guess the Ubuntu GNOME Remix is going to want newer version, we should try to accomodate that need if we can. One way would be to do the fork of gnome-control-center we have been talking about for a while. Blocking GTK to 3.8 is likely to make hard to update GNOME components anyway, if we decide to go this way... What do others think? Cheers, Sebastien Bacher -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.**com ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/**mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-**desktophttps://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: Staying on GTK/GNOME 3.8 next cycle/for the LTS?
I've used Ubuntu every day for 7 years and am active in the GNOME community. The fact that Ubuntu lags one release behind GNOME is already a significant burden for me. I often spend time building the newest version of GNOME apps, which can be challenging since Ubuntu's libraries lag behind. If Ubuntu stays with 3.8 for Saucy+1 (i.e. starts to lag two releases behind GNOME), I'd quite possibly switch to Fedora or Debian. Staying with 3.8 could be fine for most users, especially if Canonical wants to focus most of its energy on phones and tablets. But for anyone who wants to use the latest GNOME apps and especially anyone who wants to contribute to GNOME development, two releases back is just too much. adam On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 2:17 PM, Brian Curtis bcurti...@ubuntu.com wrote: Hi to all, I personally think staying at GNOME 3.8 would not be a great decision. In my opinion Ubuntu is starting to turn into a Redhat. I think it used to be the leader in the latest and greatest in the community of free and open source software, and ever since a majority of canonical has been tasked with touch TODO's it seems more and more scared of continuing the path with the latest and greatest. This seems true for the desktop team as well. GNOME has already released a stable 3.10 and has already started on 3.12. The work that seemed to go into going from 3.6 to 3.8 this cycle seemed to happen early and was minimal compared to what's been going on with the touch stuff. I'm not going to claim to know what workload is entailed with going to 3.10 next cycle, but what drew me into Ubuntu in the first place was that it wasn't afraid to have the latest and greatest software available to all desktop users. I hope that we don't lose that great aspect of Ubuntu just because the work entailed from touch tasks is taking over your time. Thanks, ~Brian Curtis On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Sebastien Bacher seb...@ubuntu.com wrote: Hey everyone, I know this cycle is not finished yet, but in case some of us start thinking about next cycle, I wanted to start a discussion on the GNOME version to use for the lts. I think we should stick with GNOME 3.8 another cycle, here are the reasons why: - we (Ubuntu Desktop) are currently mostly happy with what we have - the focus for the Ubuntu Desktop team is likely to continue to be Ubuntu Touch/phone next cycle - due to the previous factor, we are going to be limited in resources to do desktop work - it's a LTS cycle, we should focus on bugs fixing if possible - GTK 3.10 deprecates several options, it would be good to stay away from those controverses for the LTS (see https://launchpad.net/bugs/1228886 as an example of what is going to happen once we deprecate those options) - it seems like the next RedHat enterprise edition is going to be based on GNOME 3.8, if that's the case it would make sense for us to focus on bringing quality to the same version/share the maintainance work a bit What do other things? I guess the Ubuntu GNOME Remix is going to want newer version, we should try to accomodate that need if we can. One way would be to do the fork of gnome-control-center we have been talking about for a while. Blocking GTK to 3.8 is likely to make hard to update GNOME components anyway, if we decide to go this way... What do others think? Cheers, Sebastien Bacher -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop -- = Ubuntu Member: http://launchpad.net/~bcurtiswx Freenode IRC: BCurtisWX Ubuntu Wiki: http://wiki.ubuntu.com/BCurtisWX Ubuntu District of Columbia LoCo: http://dc.ubuntu-us.org/ GNOME3 Team: http://launchpad.net/~gnome3-team Ubuntu Bug Control Team: http://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-bugcontrol = -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: Staying on GTK/GNOME 3.8 next cycle/for the LTS?
On 13-10-01 01:45 PM, Sebastien Bacher wrote: I think we should stick with GNOME 3.8 another cycle, here are the reasons why: I think this is a great idea, and will give us time to iron out all the current bugs before the LTS. For one, screen locking is all broken _again_, and really needs to get fixed before the LTS so Ubuntu can get used in enterprise scenarios. - it's a LTS cycle, we should focus on bugs fixing if possible - GTK 3.10 deprecates several options, it would be good to stay away from those controverses for the LTS (see https://launchpad.net/bugs/1228886 as an example of what is going to happen once we deprecate those options) We don't have enough time in the GNOME 6 month cycle to properly stabilize it enough for an LTS release. Staying on 3.8 will give us a chance to catch up. - it seems like the next RedHat enterprise edition is going to be based on GNOME 3.8, if that's the case it would make sense for us to focus on bringing quality to the same version/share the maintainance work a bit Even better. We'll be helping maintain an older release that someone will actually care about. Marc. -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: Staying on GTK/GNOME 3.8 next cycle/for the LTS?
On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 3:39 PM, Marc Deslauriers marc.deslauri...@canonical.com wrote: On 13-10-01 03:16 PM, Adam Dingle wrote: I've used Ubuntu every day for 7 years and am active in the GNOME community. The fact that Ubuntu lags one release behind GNOME is already a significant burden for me. I often spend time building the newest version of GNOME apps, which can be challenging since Ubuntu's libraries lag behind. If Ubuntu stays with 3.8 for Saucy+1 (i.e. starts to lag two releases behind GNOME), I'd quite possibly switch to Fedora or Debian. Staying with 3.8 could be fine for most users, especially if Canonical wants to focus most of its energy on phones and tablets. But for anyone who wants to use the latest GNOME apps and especially anyone who wants to contribute to GNOME development, two releases back is just too much. Isn't there a GNOME PPA that has the latest version in it? That would probably be exactly what you need. Even one version behing isn't great for GNOME development. Yes, there is the GNOME 3 PPA (https://launchpad.net/~gnome3-team/+archive/gnome3) and now also the GNOME 3 Next PPA (https://launchpad.net/~gnome3-team/+archive/gnome3-next). Unfortunately 1. These PPAs still lag behind. For example, I've been on Ubuntu Saucy for months now, but until recently only GTK 3.8 was available in the PPAs, preventing me from easily running newer GNOME apps which required 3.9.x. WebKit 2.x was also not available for a long time. 2. These PPAs are less stable than the daily build. For example, just last night I was trying to figure out why the Ubuntu Online Accounts control panel wouldn't show up for me, and eventually I found the problem vanished when I purged the GNOME 3 PPA. For these reasons, it would be a lot more convenient for me if the actual Ubuntu daily build tracked the latest GNOME or was one release behind at most. adam -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: Staying on GTK/GNOME 3.8 next cycle/for the LTS?
Le 01/10/2013 21:16, Adam Dingle a écrit : I've used Ubuntu every day for 7 years and am active in the GNOME community. The fact that Ubuntu lags one release behind GNOME is already a significant burden for me. I often spend time building the newest version of GNOME apps, which can be challenging since Ubuntu's libraries lag behind. If Ubuntu stays with 3.8 for Saucy+1 (i.e. starts to lag two releases behind GNOME), I'd quite possibly switch to Fedora or Debian. Staying with 3.8 could be fine for most users, especially if Canonical wants to focus most of its energy on phones and tablets. But for anyone who wants to use the latest GNOME apps and especially anyone who wants to contribute to GNOME development, two releases back is just too much. adam Hey Adam, I'm sorry to read that Ubuntu being behind on GNOME releases is a burden for you :/ Can I ask if that's the opinion of an user, or from a developer wanting to contribute to GNOME? You probably understand that's it's hard for us to make both targets happy at the same time, especially in GNOME directions is less aligned with Ubuntu's which makes harder to include their newer version. If you want to write code for GNOME trunk, using the GNOME3 ppa/jhbuild probably makes sense (or Fedora if that seems a better option for you), you are just not on top of our priority list for the next LTS (I hope we can get back to a situation that makes GNOME users happier after the LTS though). One of the question we need to answer there, is to know if the improvements from GNOME 3.10 are going to be enough benefits, to our users, to justify the bugs/stability issues/lack of integration that are going to come with the updates? (if we update, that's going to take our desktop resources, which means we are not going to be able to do work smoothing rough edges). You probably know of those tradeoffs, since you reported some of the nautilus usability issues that came with the GNOME updates and didn't get addressed yet... Looking to some of the notes of GNOME 3.10/the changes listed there: - better wayland support: that's not going to be ready for the LTS/not likely a compelling feature there - shipping preview of new music/maps/software/photes/chat applications: that's orthogonal to this discussion, those are not going to be default in the LTS - some UI improvements to applications: that would be nice to have, though that's making most app looks less integrated under Unity, which is an issue for us - improvements to gnome-shell: it would be nice to get in the GNOME remix, that's not an argument for our default desktop though - GTK got some new widgets, and deprecated quite some options ... which is going to bring heated discussions our way, would be nice to defer those to the next LTS cycle - gnome-control-center improvements, those make the UI more suitable for a mobile environment (and less for a desktop one as a side effect) ... you can argue it's a win, it seems not obvious for Unity/desktop though I'm probably overlooking some of the changes, but it doesn't seem there is anything in there that would be so much an improvement for our users that it would justify spending our efforts on those updates rather than on fixing the usability issues and bugs we already have in our backlog. It would be useful if you (or some of the others that think that not updating would be an error) would give specifics example of what GNOME 3.10 can bring to our users. Cheers, Sebastien Bacher -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: Staying on GTK/GNOME 3.8 next cycle/for the LTS?
Le 01/10/2013 20:23, Dylan McCall a écrit : Do we know what is going to happen with Ubuntu-specific system utilities with 14.10 and Unity 8? In particular, I'm curious about Software Centre / Updater, Ubuntu One, Startup Disk Creator, Jockey and Ubuntu Online Accounts. Incidentally, those are quite central to Ubuntu. Arguably more so than the Unity shell, itself. Hey, Thanks for your reply. My gut feeling is that: - what we current have is working well enough that it should be fine as our next LTS - the new stack Ubuntu SDK/touch is not going to be ready for a LTS yet - the LTS after this one is going to be in long enough that this new stack is going to be ready In summary I think that the GNOME conflicts are going to go away after that LTS, as we move away from the GNOME stack to base our applications on our own toolkit. It should make GNOME more independent from Unity and allows both to move without conflicts. In the list of softwares you listed: - software-center/updater are apt based, Ubuntu Touch is leaning toward a new approach with system images and click packages, those are likely to be more important in the futur - Ubuntu One is using Qt on the desktop for some time already - startup disk creator has a different frontend, including a KDE one, likely it's going to be easy to have a Qt version if needed - Ubuntu online account is qt based and works on the touch image already Cheers, Sebastien Bacher -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: Staying on GTK/GNOME 3.8 next cycle/for the LTS?
Le 01/10/2013 20:17, Brian Curtis a écrit : I'm not going to claim to know what workload is entailed with going to 3.10 next cycle, but what drew me into Ubuntu in the first place was that it wasn't afraid to have the latest and greatest software available to all desktop users. I hope that we don't lose that great aspect of Ubuntu just because the work entailed from touch tasks is taking over your time. Hey Brian, Well, we decided to shift the focus to stability, and stay a cycle behind GNOME, before the touch work started. That decision was not based on the fact that we were too busy, but rather on the believe that users value stability over new versions. Speaking about the Touch work, we don't see that as diverting efforts, but rather focussing efforts on what the futur of computing/Ubuntu is going to be like... sure it means the old stack is going to change less, but we are still bring fixes and improvements to it, while working on that transtions Cheers, Sebastien Bacher -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: Staying on GTK/GNOME 3.8 next cycle/for the LTS?
With a personal hat on... I just started maintaining Gnome Nibbles and the 3.8 release has some serious issues Obviously a game not shipped by default isn't a big issue.. I'd definitely like to see a more up-to-date version of Rhythmbox specifically. It's had various issues that are fixed upstream in 3.8 (iPod sync) from what I remember. With a work hat on... I see Evince already has a 3.10 in Saucy... would that stay that way? Without a particularly hat on.. Why 3.8 over 3.10? 3.10 seems like few major changes and mostly bugs being fixed. With the deprecation of certain options... (I can't speak to the immediate bug) isn't it better to do that for an LTS release as opposed to having to maintain them for 5 years? Thanks, Bryan On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 4:22 PM, Sebastien Bacher seb...@ubuntu.com wrote: Le 01/10/2013 21:16, Adam Dingle a écrit : I've used Ubuntu every day for 7 years and am active in the GNOME community. The fact that Ubuntu lags one release behind GNOME is already a significant burden for me. I often spend time building the newest version of GNOME apps, which can be challenging since Ubuntu's libraries lag behind. If Ubuntu stays with 3.8 for Saucy+1 (i.e. starts to lag two releases behind GNOME), I'd quite possibly switch to Fedora or Debian. Staying with 3.8 could be fine for most users, especially if Canonical wants to focus most of its energy on phones and tablets. But for anyone who wants to use the latest GNOME apps and especially anyone who wants to contribute to GNOME development, two releases back is just too much. adam Hey Adam, I'm sorry to read that Ubuntu being behind on GNOME releases is a burden for you :/ Can I ask if that's the opinion of an user, or from a developer wanting to contribute to GNOME? You probably understand that's it's hard for us to make both targets happy at the same time, especially in GNOME directions is less aligned with Ubuntu's which makes harder to include their newer version. If you want to write code for GNOME trunk, using the GNOME3 ppa/jhbuild probably makes sense (or Fedora if that seems a better option for you), you are just not on top of our priority list for the next LTS (I hope we can get back to a situation that makes GNOME users happier after the LTS though). One of the question we need to answer there, is to know if the improvements from GNOME 3.10 are going to be enough benefits, to our users, to justify the bugs/stability issues/lack of integration that are going to come with the updates? (if we update, that's going to take our desktop resources, which means we are not going to be able to do work smoothing rough edges). You probably know of those tradeoffs, since you reported some of the nautilus usability issues that came with the GNOME updates and didn't get addressed yet... Looking to some of the notes of GNOME 3.10/the changes listed there: - better wayland support: that's not going to be ready for the LTS/not likely a compelling feature there - shipping preview of new music/maps/software/photes/**chat applications: that's orthogonal to this discussion, those are not going to be default in the LTS - some UI improvements to applications: that would be nice to have, though that's making most app looks less integrated under Unity, which is an issue for us - improvements to gnome-shell: it would be nice to get in the GNOME remix, that's not an argument for our default desktop though - GTK got some new widgets, and deprecated quite some options ... which is going to bring heated discussions our way, would be nice to defer those to the next LTS cycle - gnome-control-center improvements, those make the UI more suitable for a mobile environment (and less for a desktop one as a side effect) ... you can argue it's a win, it seems not obvious for Unity/desktop though I'm probably overlooking some of the changes, but it doesn't seem there is anything in there that would be so much an improvement for our users that it would justify spending our efforts on those updates rather than on fixing the usability issues and bugs we already have in our backlog. It would be useful if you (or some of the others that think that not updating would be an error) would give specifics example of what GNOME 3.10 can bring to our users. Cheers, Sebastien Bacher -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.**com ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/**mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-**desktophttps://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: Staying on GTK/GNOME 3.8 next cycle/for the LTS?
Le 01/10/2013 22:46, Bryan Quigley a écrit : With a personal hat on... I just started maintaining Gnome Nibbles and the 3.8 release has some serious issues Obviously a game not shipped by default isn't a big issue.. If your game works with GTK 3.8 I see no reason to not update it in Ubuntu (as an app dev you should have interest to get your game running on any distros and not only the most recent dev ones anyway no?) I'd definitely like to see a more up-to-date version of Rhythmbox specifically. It's had various issues that are fixed upstream in 3.8 (iPod sync) from what I remember. The reason that one was not update is mostly manpower issues... With a work hat on... I see Evince already has a 3.10 in Saucy... would that stay that way? Sure, we updated to the new version because we though it was safe and worth it Without a particularly hat on.. Why 3.8 over 3.10? 3.10 seems like few major changes and mostly bugs being fixed. With the deprecation of certain options... (I can't speak to the immediate bug) isn't it better to do that for an LTS release as opposed to having to maintain them for 5 years? Well, for the reasons listed; - doing the updates/testing them/dealing with new bugs is lot of work - the options are there for years and years, maintaining them doesn't require any extra work, they are there and work as they work - some of the design changes are not so trivial/don't make sense with Unity - if other major distributions end up maintaining the same GNOME version for their customers, it means we can share efforts. If we are shifted by a version, that's not true anymore Cheers, Sebastien Bacher -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: Staying on GTK/GNOME 3.8 next cycle/for the LTS?
On 02/10/13 03:45, Sebastien Bacher wrote: Hey everyone, I know this cycle is not finished yet, but in case some of us start thinking about next cycle, I wanted to start a discussion on the GNOME version to use for the lts. I think we should stick with GNOME 3.8 another cycle, here are the reasons why: - we (Ubuntu Desktop) are currently mostly happy with what we have - the focus for the Ubuntu Desktop team is likely to continue to be Ubuntu Touch/phone next cycle - due to the previous factor, we are going to be limited in resources to do desktop work - it's a LTS cycle, we should focus on bugs fixing if possible - GTK 3.10 deprecates several options, it would be good to stay away from those controverses for the LTS (see https://launchpad.net/bugs/1228886 as an example of what is going to happen once we deprecate those options) - it seems like the next RedHat enterprise edition is going to be based on GNOME 3.8, if that's the case it would make sense for us to focus on bringing quality to the same version/share the maintainance work a bit Right, from a support point of view it makes perfect sense to stick with 3.8, especially if there will be long term upstream support of the 3.8 branch, although I havent been able to confirm this, other than the obvious fact that RedHat will support it for their customers atleast. What do other things? I guess the Ubuntu GNOME Remix is going to want newer version, we should try to accomodate that need if we can. One way would be to do the fork of gnome-control-center we have been talking about for a while. Blocking GTK to 3.8 is likely to make hard to update GNOME components anyway, if we decide to go this way... We have many users that want the latest and greatest GNOME, however we also do get quite a few requests for a stable LTS version. GNOME development is heavily focused on gnome-shell and the GNOME apps right now, so while 3.10 brings lots of new features and improvents for Ubuntu GNOME users, and I suspect most of our users are expecting 3.10 to come in next release. From an Ubuntu perspective I guess its really just a huge number of bug fixes. I guess we would settle for a 3.8 base, with select packages that are outside whats used in standard Ubuntu updated to 3.10, however blocking GTK at 3.8 makes this largely impossible. Either way some concerns I have - Ubuntu will keep holding back on GNOME updates until QML/Touch stack is ready and then just dump it, making it really hard for us to catch up again. Transitioning from 3.8 - 3.12 would likely be a big nightmare, also if we end up with a 2 cycle divergance, mixing packages from different releases will become much harder than it already is. - We will most likely need to transition ubuntu GNOME to wayland at some point, however we can't really even start on that in an experimental capacity until 3.10 is in the archives. - There are a number of major bugs we have on the PPA's that are really outside of our scope to fix, but as long as they are PPA only packages, no one cares to help fixing them. Things like the Software Center crash with updated Webkit plus a few new issues introduced with 3.10 such as unity custom menus in GTK and the DisplayConfig needing to be implemented in Unity. - Its really unlikely that we will be able to track 3.12 on a 3.8 base, we mostly get away with 3.10 since some of the core libraries in Saucy did get updated to 3.10 versions, however there are packages we simply can't package on the PPA's such as glib, gvfs, cogl/clutter etc due the massive list of rdepends. Right now we have had to revert a huge number of patches just to get gnome-shell 3.10 running on Saucy. - If the PPA's end up a cycle behind and there is complete lack of wayland support, we will likely start loosing users to Fedora etc. Tim What do others think? Cheers, Sebastien Bacher -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
