We started discussing this issue at last week's Desktop Team meeting but it is complicated and difficult enough that we decided to move it to the mailing list instead.
On Mon, Oct 30, 2017 at 10:05 PM, Jeremy Bicha <[email protected]> wrote: > 2. What to do with all the headerbar patches? > https://launchpad.net/bugs/1719322 > a. We could drop the ones that haven't been pushed upstream (to GNOME) > b. We could keep them but set them to only apply against Unity One of the Desktop Team goals was to reduce the Ubuntu-specific patches we are carrying. We made great progress in Ubuntu 17.10 by dropping Ubuntu Online Accounts, but we are still carrying a lot of patches. There are two major kinds of headerbar patches.. One replaces the headerbar with a patch to add a separate titlebar. These patches was more important when non-GNOME desktops and themes had trouble with the headerbars. The second kind of patch restores a traditional File/Edit/View (FEV) menu to apps that have removed theirs. This is nice for Unity's menubars, but in my opinion aren't necessarily better for users in other desktops. There is resistance to upstreaming these patches to Debian GNOME because they add lots of translatable strings without providing translations. The FEV patches potentially are more difficult to maintain. For instance, we kept the titlebar patch for Nautilus in Ubuntu 16.10 and 17.04 but not the FEV because no one volunteered to do the work. There is a large and growing number of apps that have headerbars that Ubuntu never patched. Also, more apps are converting to them (for instance, I expect Firefox to get headerbars before Ubuntu 18.04 is released). I think there's a strong argument that can be made that Ubuntu should generally distribute apps as intended by the developers unless we are fixing a significant bug. Sometimes these patches were set to apply only to Unity and sometimes they were set to apply to anywhere that wasn't GNOME. And sometimes the patches introduce bugs when they are applied outside GNOME. One other issue: Unity currently can't handle locally integrated menus for apps with headerbars https://launchpad.net/bugs/1720555 Thanks, Jeremy Bicha -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
