Gentoo Archives: gentoo-project

From: Pacho Ramos <pacho@g.o>
To: gentoo-project@l.g.o
Cc: gnome@g.o, qa@g.o
Subject: [gentoo-project] Re: Sticking to GNOME 2 complicated after regressive GNOME 3 stabilization. (was: Call for agenda items - Council meeting 2014-01-14)
Date: Thu, 09 Jan 2014 20:20:49
Message-Id: 1389298839.424.38.camel@belkin5
In Reply to: [gentoo-project] Sticking to GNOME 2 complicated after regressive GNOME 3 stabilization. (was: Call for agenda items - Council meeting 2014-01-14) by Tom Wijsman
1 El jue, 09-01-2014 a las 00:40 +0100, Tom Wijsman escribió:
2 > On Sat, 4 Jan 2014 20:46:05 +0100
3 > Ulrich Mueller <ulm@g.o> wrote:
4 >
5 > > In less than two weeks from now, the council will meet again. This is
6 > > the time to raise and prepare items that the council should put on the
7 > > agenda to discuss or vote on.
8 [...]
9
10 Not sure how to group all but will try :/
11
12 1. People don't wanting to update to Gnome3 due Systemd -> I wouldn't
13 start again the thread about systemd and why this people hates so much
14 systemd, but if they really really dislike so much systemd they can
15 still run Gnome without it, they will get some problems (in concrete, I
16 remember power-management due gnome-settings-daemon (they would need to
17 run something in background to take care of hibernating/suspending, a
18 bit like we needed to do with Gnome 2.32 when nobody was logged in a
19 gnome session), and multiseat support (switching users could break, but
20 it was broken already in Gnome 2.32 for a long time, I remember being
21 unable to open more gdm instanced for new users with 2.32 just a few
22 months ago on this laptop and just a few weeks in all the machines I
23 updated recently to 3.8). There will be more problems and some upstreams
24 will refuse to even investigate the issue if you are not running
25 systemd... but upstream won't either support you with 2.32. Then, if
26 they are going to run an unsupported by upstream setup, I would prefer
27 to run the "latest" one than 2.32.
28
29 2. GDM 2.20 -> Some people looks to still want to use it... I personally
30 would prefer them to run lightdm or MDM if they don't want to run new
31 GDM. Lightdm worked fine last time I used it, MDM is still not packaged
32 on Gentoo but, at least, is a fork of GDM 2.20 with some fixes and
33 better maintained... but keep running GDM 2.20 looks to me like the
34 worst option.
35
36 3. 3D support -> This is the major blocker for running Gnome3 currently,
37 I even suffered it in one of the machines whose nouveau driver wasn't
38 really working and needed to force software rendering for it. Finally I
39 was able to buy an old (but still supported by nvidia-drivers for some
40 ages) 6800GT by 18 eur ;)
41
42 But there is no solution for this apart of:
43 - Use software rendering
44 - Use gnome-panel-3.8 (the "flashback" session), but this is really
45 ugly, would be nice if could be improved with upstream, I think it's
46 used a bit more often by Arch people, I patched it to at least run
47 nautilus to draw background but still smells :S
48
49 Anyway, this isn't a distribution problem, this affects all
50 distributions, if there were a better gnome-panel package that we could
51 package, we would do it for sure
52
53 Regarding CPU/memory requirements... this is the first time I see this
54 problem, the older machine I maintain (a PentiumIV) has no problem
55 moving Gnome 3.8 over how it was performing with 2.32 (once I "fixed"
56 the 3D issues I have commented). Things like evolution-3.8 are much much
57 better (in performance and bug fixes) that 2.32...
58
59 4. Regarding stability of Gnome 2.32... Have that people looked at
60 changelog (NEWS file) for only part of the things from 2.32 to 3.8? Does
61 people know that a bug eating (yes, losing them) mails when fetching
62 with POP3 with an unstable network was fixed in evolution-3.8.5? Does
63 people know that nobody was going to fix people needing to set proxy in
64 various places due partial dconf/gconf migration? (this are only a few
65 examples)
66
67 5. Regarding TomWij mail, yes, I know that your intention is only to
68 bring attention to this to try to find a solution, I really appreciate
69 your help contributing to not get lots of FUDs to spread without end in
70 forums :)
71
72 6. Regarding Cinnamon -> we need help maintaining it because it's
73 getting more complicated to maintain because its upstream is deviating
74 more from Gnome upstream. Anyway, the current version in the tree was
75 still working ok (with gnome-3.8, for 3.10 we will need to involve more
76 work)
77
78 7. Regarding MATE -> I simply don't care, I won't bring it to the tree
79 because I don't have time for maintaining it and not interest (since I
80 am a happy Gnome3 user... yes, running systemd and not the Classical
81 mode, the "ugly" one). But, of course, I would be really happy if some
82 of this people would maintain it and offer it (I think a dev was
83 interested on it in the past, but no idea what did occur finally, maybe
84 he could get help from people maintaining MATE on overlays and similar
85 as it won't surely be an easy task)
86
87 8. Maybe we could get some help to improve gnome-panel-3.8, or find a
88 way to run the old gnome-panel-2.32 with the rest of 3.8. I am thinking
89 here in people not being able to have 3D support. For people disliking
90 the new gnome3 look I would point them to Classic mode (that is
91 completely official), extensions, cinnamon...
92
93 I have no idea but, would the mate-panel require many more "mate"
94 things?
95
96 9. Regarding Gnome 2.32 maintainer ship -> I *personally* won't take
97 care of it, but that doesn't block others from doing it. The problem is
98 that it's not easy to really maintain that as it's not maintained at all
99 by upstream, and we are one of the last distributions still providing it
100 (then, it's really difficult to really fix the bugs people will find for
101 sure). Also, I am opposed to people running things like epiphany-2.32,
102 evolution-2.32, evince-2.32... they really have a lot of bugs that has
103 been fixed during this years in newer versions.
104
105 10. The news item -> What concrete info do you miss? We could add it to
106 the guide pointed in existing news item:
107 https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GNOME/3.8-upgrade-guide
108
109 I wrote there some information about Classic mode, extensions... :/
110
111 11. I really agree with Tetromino's reply, he explains pretty well what
112 are the problems to "maintain" Gnome 2.32 more and more time (I am
113 talking about really maintaining it, not keeping it in the tree with
114 bugs accumulating and the "maintainers" ignoring them because they are
115 really hard to fix)
116
117 12. Also Gilles' mail explains pretty well what blocks, for example,
118 MATE, it's more related with man power than anything else.
119
120 Hope this clarify a bit more the things
121
122 Regards