Hello everybody, This email is doing a status update on what the Ubuntu Desktop Team decided to do with GNOME in natty.
The corresponding specification can be find on https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/packageselection-desktop-n-gnome3 The summary from the blueprint was "GNOME is working toward GNOME3, we will want to update what we can without risky stability and clean our stack..." We are mid-cycle now and about time to decide what to do for natty. We started the work on GNOME3 in the ubuntu-desktop ppa at the start of the cycle and said we would move components to natty when ready. It turned out that it's not really possible to bring some updated components or softwares in without bringing the GNOME3 desktop (see the blueprint whiteboard for details). So the choice is on whether to switch to GNOME3 this cycle or not. The topic has been discussed several times between the Ubuntu Desktop Team members recently and we decided to stay on GNOME 2.32 for natty and ship GNOME3 in a ppa for this cycle and land it early in Ubuntu proper next cycle. To give some details on the decision: - GNOME3 is still far to be stable, work is going on upstream and the integration in the distribution proved to still require extra work as well - GTK3 is over a month late on schedule and has been breaking compatibility a lot which made difficult to track updates - the GNOME3 stable release is one week before the natty hard freeze, which let very little margin to deal with eventual upstream delay or to do proper integration work in the distribution In summary we don't feel integrating GNOME3 with a high quality level in Ubuntu is a job which can be done in one cycle and we prefer to delay it to be default next cycle. That doesn't mean that GNOME3 will not be available in Ubuntu though, a new team has been created to work on it in launchpad: https://launchpad.net/~gnome3-team The team is open to contributors and we welcome help getting GNOME3 in shape. We aim at shipping a full GNOME3 there by the end of the cycle including gnome-shell and to reach the quality required to have it landing in Ubuntu at the start of next cycle. The ppa will has the advantage to make contribution easier, to not be blocked by the Ubuntu freezes and to make sure we can include the updates and fixes that will come even after natty. Sebastien Bacher, in behalf of Ubuntu Desktop -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
