Hello release team, The GNOME team have been talking about what the chances are of having GNOME 2.8 uploaded to unstable since it was released upstream early in September.
While two months ago we never consider this to be a real possibility for various reasons (Sarge was going to freeze real soon at that time, GNOME 2.6 was rock solid in testing and it's not the smartest thing to ship GNOME 2.x.0 versions in a stable release), today things have changed enough that we need to reconsider. GNOME 2.7/2.8 has been packaged and maintained up to date in experimental for over 3 months, and at this point we believe it is release-quality and ready to go to unstable and testing. GNOME 2.8.1 has been released already, polishing the major bugs that were found in 2.8.0, making it suitable for a Debian stable distribution. The GNOME team has shown signs of tiredness after too much time maintaining two branches: most of the bug reports we get against the 2.6 packages are general GNOME issues that were addressed in GNOME 2.8 (most notably the MIME system replacement), or stuff that isn't so trivial to backport. After two major GNOME releases packaged as a team, we're seeing how we're gradually losing interest because of this situation. On a side note, we'd like to start working on GNOME 2.9 and we have no sane place to put it (experimental being used by 2.8 already). We're not too excited about maintaining _3_ branches, as one can imagine. :) Debian users _are_ using GNOME 2.8, and while it's available in experimental, it's a pain for them as there's no optimal way of maintaining an up to date GNOME 2.8 dekstop easily unless completely upgrading to experimental. We'd be ok to stick to GNOME 2.6 in Sarge if it was frozen already, as this would let us dump 2.8 in unstable, aliviating most of these problems, but the reality is that there isn't a fixed freeze date yet. We've tested upgrades and migrations, both complete and partial, from 2.6 to 2.8 and apparently everything is solid, so we'd like to get permission to upload GNOME 2.8 to unstable, and try to get it in Sarge as quick as possible. If we get your OK to do the upload, my personal opinion is that once 2.8 is in unstable, it'd be difficult to not end up shipping with GNOME 2.8 in sarge, as the new shlibs will trickle to not-so-gnome-ish packages like Firefox and so. Others may think that it should be possible to work as KDE packages are doing it. Again, I'm confident that it'll go smoothly. Thanks, Jordi, on behalf of the GNOME team. -- Jordi Mallach Pérez -- Debian developer http://www.debian.org/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.sindominio.net/ GnuPG public key information available at http://oskuro.net/~jordi/
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