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  • future of GNOME Flashback and GNOME-2-related packages?

    From Simon McVittie@21:1/5 to All on Wed Apr 6 22:10:02 2016
    On Wed, 06 Apr 2016 at 00:18:10 +0200, Ondřej Surý wrote:
    I have a feeling that we are hoarding packages, but the overall quality varies a lot (not pointing fingers here)

    This, and occasional mentions of gnome-screensaver in the xscreensaver
    debacle, reminded me that the GNOME team is still responsible for
    quite a lot of pre-GNOME-Shell packages, notably the Flashback suite (-screensaver, -panel, -power-manager). It's clear to people who are
    involved in GNOME upstream that these are deprecated, and in particular
    that they are unnecessary for GNOME 3 users, but this isn't necessarily
    very clear to non-experts.

    We've had Shell in two stable releases now, and we now have both Cinnamon
    and MATE available for fans of the traditional desktop. Is it time to
    be more aggressive about removing gnome-flashback and its dependencies,
    maybe with transitional packages to upgrade (sidegrade?) to one of the
    GNOME forks for people who want that?

    Alternatively, if people are still maintaining Flashback as a distinct
    project (both upstream and downstream), can/should we give a stronger indication that it isn't part of the core GNOME suite, and should be
    treated as its own distinct desktop environment? Perhaps it should even
    have a distinct Maintainer team?

    Similar question for the libraries and infrastructure bits that have
    been superseded upstream and are now discouraged: Gtk 2, libgnome,
    gnomevfs, gconf, gnome-desktop 2 and so on. These are particularly
    annoying because some non-GNOME software that wants to "integrate with
    GNOME" still uses them - for instance see Java, vim-gnome (which is a
    trap, people should probably prefer vim-gtk or even the new vim-gtk3), dia-gnome, stardict-gnome.

    S

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  • From Paul Wise@21:1/5 to Simon McVittie on Thu Apr 7 05:40:01 2016
    On Thu, Apr 7, 2016 at 2:51 AM, Simon McVittie wrote:

    We've had Shell in two stable releases now, and we now have both Cinnamon
    and MATE available for fans of the traditional desktop. Is it time to
    be more aggressive about removing gnome-flashback and its dependencies,
    maybe with transitional packages to upgrade (sidegrade?) to one of the
    GNOME forks for people who want that?

    I would say don't add transitional packages but do add information
    about this to the release notes.

    BTW, is gnome-shell classic mode still going to be available upstream?

    --
    bye,
    pabs

    https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise

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  • From Simon McVittie@21:1/5 to Paul Wise on Thu Apr 7 10:20:02 2016
    On Thu, 07 Apr 2016 at 10:39:41 +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
    BTW, is gnome-shell classic mode still going to be available upstream?

    GNOME 3.20's gnome-shell-extensions still has it. I can't say for sure
    whether it will be in 3.22 (which is probably what stretch will release
    with) but I'm not aware of any reason why it would be removed.

    To be completely clear about this, there are three levels of GNOMEness
    in recent/future Debian:

    * GNOME 3 as intended by upstream, the default in Debian 7/8/testing:
    the one with the black bar at the top, using GNOME 3 technology to
    provide the GNOME 3 UX design

    * GNOME Classic, available since Debian 8: using GNOME 3 technology
    (GNOME Shell plus some extensions) to provide a UX design superficially
    similar to GNOME 2

    * GNOME Flashback (previously Fallback, confusingly labelled "Classic"
    in Debian 7): using a mixture of GNOME 2 and 3 technology to get
    a UX somewhere between GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 on weaker systems.
    This used to be run by GNOME 3 as a fallback on systems with no
    hardware 3D, but now GNOME 3 relies on llvmpipe to provide
    "good enough" software compositing instead.

    The one I'm concerned about here is Flashback, because that depends on components that are essentially dead upstream (but with names that could mislead users into thinking they are still a required component for
    GNOME), and there are actively-developed forks with their own upstream developers (MATE, Cinnamon) which might be a better choice now.

    S

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  • From Emilio Pozuelo Monfort@21:1/5 to Simon McVittie on Wed Apr 6 22:20:02 2016
    On 06/04/16 20:51, Simon McVittie wrote:
    Similar question for the libraries and infrastructure bits that have
    been superseded upstream and are now discouraged: Gtk 2, libgnome,
    gnomevfs, gconf, gnome-desktop 2 and so on. These are particularly
    annoying because some non-GNOME software that wants to "integrate with
    GNOME" still uses them - for instance see Java, vim-gnome (which is a
    trap, people should probably prefer vim-gtk or even the new vim-gtk3), dia-gnome, stardict-gnome.

    Those libraries and packages should be removed. We've been doing that for a while, though progress is slow. See

    https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=pkg-gnome-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org;tag=oldlibs

    More help in getting rid of that kind of packages would be very welcome.

    Cheers,
    Emilio

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