Re: [gentoo-dev] Gnome Stabilization 3.6 or 3.8

[Tom Wijsman]

On Wed, 07 Aug 2013 09:14:14 -0400
Alexandre Rostovtsev <tetromino@g.o> wrote:

> On Wed, 2013-08-07 at 14:45 +0200, Michael Weber wrote:
>
> > What are the reasons to stable 3.8 and not 3.6, a version w/o this
> > restriction, enabling all non systemd users to profit from this
> > eye-candy as well.
> >
> > I raise the freedom of choice card here. And deliberately choosing
> > an uncooperative version doesn't shine a good light.
>
> To stabilize gnome-3.6, we would need
>
> 1. one or (preferably) two *active* gentoo developers;
> 2. who are familiar with gnome's internals and are able to backport
> bugfixes from 3.8/3.10 without support from upstream developers; and
> 3. who volunteer to run openrc+gnome-3.6 for a long time on their main
> machines so that they can give a stable 3.6 the support that the word
> 'stable' implies.
>
> We do not have such people on the gnome team.

There's going to be a lot of complaints and rant about this, some of
which has already started in some places like the forums; as far as I
see I barely see people raising their hands to put in the work. At most
I recall some work here and there by one or two individuals, but in all
seriousness I don't think that's enough to pull it off.

While people can scream, complaint and rant all they want about choice;
it isn't going to happen if nobody is going to implement it, until that
happens following whatever upstream does is the only reasonable thing
to do. Or if you really want to help, help implement the choice... :)

It's not enough to just re-introduce support as well as to port back
part of that support, which they don't seem to even have currently for
3.8; it goes a lot further than that, as mentioned by tetromino, the
fixes have to be ported back as well.

Let's say if they ignore all that and do stabilize 3.6; then they are
just moving this problem, because then they won't end up getting 3.8 or
later stabilized in the future because of the same objection.

Using systemd and GNOME 3.8.3 on a daily basis, I haven't been able to
run the entire 3.6 and 3.8 until a late fix [1] that took me weeks to
find in all the seas of debugging information I have enabled; there are
some other reports of users having similar and other issues, so I deem
fixes like those are necessary for stabilization. Because really, they
shouldn't be stabilizing something they know is heavily broken for some
users; thus in its current state, 3.6 isn't really a good candidate.

 [1]: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=704286

-- 
With kind regards,

Tom Wijsman (TomWij)
Gentoo Developer

E-mail address  : TomWij@g.o
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