On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 4:22 PM, Sebastien Bacher <[email protected]>
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.
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).
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. I know that the closer you are to upstream,
the more engineering effort it takes to keep things stable, and that
has a cost, so of course this depends on Ubuntu (and Canonical's)
development resources and priorities.
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.
adam
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