On 27/09/14 23:57, Michael Catanzaro wrote: > On Sat, 2014-09-27 at 20:24 +1000, Tim wrote: >> Some of the panels in 3.6 were actual separate applications from memory. > No, none of the panels in 3.6 were separate applications upstream; that > functionality was removed a long time ago (in 3.2?). You have some > downstream patches to add external applications like Deja Dup into the > control panel, but that's not what I'm talking about: you have EVERY > panel appearing as an application in the overview, making it > unnecessarily difficult to find real applications on the system and > diluting the effectiveness of the overview, after a behavior change in > some component (gnome-shell?) necessitated the addition of > NoDisplay=true; to the panel desktop files, and your > gnome-control-center does not have that change to the desktop files > because it is so old. > >> That is a pretty minor issue, and its certainly not by our choice that >> gnome-settings-daemon is outdated. > If the gnome-desktop version is your problem, I bet the Unity developers > would fork off a unity-desktop package for you. Otherwise, there wasn't > much point in unity-control-center and unity-settings-daemon, was there? They have moved the old xrandr/idle monitor code into unity-settings-daemon, however this only landed the other day. > > Anyway, that was just one more (admittedly minor) example to show the > trouble you can run into: you have a bug that you never noticed because > you mixed major versions of GNOME software. Whereas the versions of your > applications can probably vary without TOO much trouble, you should only > ever update core components like gnome-shell, gnome-settings-daemon, and > gnome-control-center at the same time. gnome-tweak-tool is another one > where something is likely to break if not upgraded in lockstep. These > communicate over unstable D-Bus interfaces and assume they're > communicating with the corresponding version of the other components. > Most things will work correctly, but something is likely to break. Its not like we just plonk them together, we do backport any dbus and gsettings changes > > It's also sad that Ubuntu GNOME users lack settings that are available > in other distros, such as control over notifications, search providers, > and all the privacy settings. gnome-control-center 3.8 was meant to get into 14.04, but it didnt make it though in time :( > > It's not really wise to vary applications' versions either, although > less risky. GTK+ has a few behavior changes each cycle that are > publicized in the release notes, and newer GNOME applications are > adapted to these behavior changes, but if your version of GTK+ is newer > than an application it will not have been changed yet. GTK+ 3.10 was > particularly problematic here. This can lead to interesting bugs that > are fixed in other distros but linger in Ubuntu GNOME, like dialogs that > are too wide, or boxes that aren't expanded so the UI is hidden (a > problem you seem to have in your downstream software updater, for > example). > > It seems that Ubuntu GNOME has no control over the software versions > that it ships. That's a shame. Maybe your distro would be more > successful outside the Ubuntu project. We have little control over Gtk+ and that is not really going to change, we will hopefully be landing gnome-desktop, gnome-settings-daemon and gnome-control-center 3.12 into 14.10 this week. We currently have little control over GNOME apps that are shared with Unity (Nautilus, gnome-terminal, gnome-system-monitor etc), however next cycle if Ubuntu keep blocking the key GNOME apps we will probably try ship current versions in a separate source package.
The Ubuntu Desktop team have been pretty supportive of Ubuntu GNOME, its just taking a lot longer than expected to decouple things so that we can have a more independent GNOME stack. I guess we are a fair way down the list of priorities. > If infrastructure is a concern, I > think the Tanglu developers would love to have more people working on > their GNOME product. Regardless, good luck. > > Michael _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
