Following up on my previous post, here's a new status update of the whole GNOME situation.

Very soon after posting that roadmap, the two steps in the process were completed, with the ftpmasters freeing dbus into experimental, and seb128 doing a round of GTK+ family uploads. No big problems have been detected in GTK+ 2.8 in unstable, so those bits are going very well.

As soon as dbus 0.60 hit experimental, both the KDE and GNOME camps got busy recompiling their stuff. KDE 3.5.0 moved from Alioth to experimental, and sjoerd got busy in a recompile quest to make sure GNOME was installable again in experimental. The dbus 0.60 transition in experimental was done in barely a few hours, and some extra dbus-using packages have been transitioning since then.

So, what's holding our unstable upload? We first need to wait for KDE 3.4 enter testing, thus clearing the major blocker for the C++ ABI transition. The number of packages involved in this is so big it's not even funny, so it's quite complicated. In short, the GNOME team is sitting on their hands watching some C++ fun. There are a few more news bits though.

Last night, there was a round of experimental updates, bringing most of the modules to their 2.12.2 versions (just 2 or 3 are missing now), and meta-gnome2 was again updated to support these versions. If you issue your usual aptitude install gnome-desktop-environment, you'll pull newer versions of most of the stuff, if that's the way you update your experimental packages. Also, the gnome package now supports gnome-screensaver. Give it a try, and be ready to purge xscreensaver if you're happy with it!

Last week, one of the pedals in my bike broke severily after some weeks of problems. One day, it suddenly fell off the crank, nearly making me fly in the middle of Blasco Ibáñez, a big avenue with dense traffic. Anyway, since Friday I can't cycle until I find a replacement pedal and crank for my old bicycle, so I had to go back to the annoying Metro.

On Monday, I used the magic card as usual, and so I did on Tuesday. When I left office and headed back home, something terrible happened, though. I went down to the Metro station, and introduced the Blue Gold. Instead of the usual processing sound, I was greeted with a loud beep, and my card went out through the "rejected" hole. The display read very clearly:

BILLETE AGOTADO

Surprised, I tried again. Oh no! I heard the train coming, so I used the emergency ticket and went in. A feeling similar to despair mixed with fear started to form in my chest while I ran down the stairway. During the travel, I thought this was just temporary, and other cancelling doors would accept the Blue Gold as usual.

When I got to the Aragón station, I tried going out with the magic card, with the same sad result. Defeated!

As I suspected, the card wasn't infinite at all, it just had an awesome number of rides on it (I think, in the end it must have been something like 270 or so), and I ran out on Tuesday, after 13 months of use.

On Wednesday, with my bicycle still broken, I had to go to the Metro again, and instead of just going through the gates, I had to go the vending machine to get one of those normal, ridiculous 10 ride ticket for 5.40€. Today, I've already used half of it, and the value of the Blue Gold is showing very clearly.

Ah well, I guess a lottery like that could not last forever...

The GNOME team has been sitting on top of ready-to-go GNOME 2.12 for way too many weeks now, but unfortunately a series of planned and unplanned transitions affecting unstable prevented us from moving them from experimental to unstable.

Today's good news is that these transitions are either going well (C++) or not at all (freetype upstream), so the release team gave us green light to start a fun GNOME 2.10→2.12 transition. There are a few aspects in this cycle that makes it a bit special and a bit more complex.

GNOME 2.12 in experimental uses dbus 0.50, which is API/bus incompatible with the previous version in testing/unstable, so when we upload GNOME 2.12, the new dbus will go in too. As KDE is also using dbus in a few places, KDE and GNOME uploads will need to happen at the same time. To make it even better, dbus 0.50 has been obsoleted by 0.60, which is again API and bus incompatible with the previous version. The GNOME and KDE teams have agreed on the following plan:

1. The Project Utopia people have uploaded dbus 0.60 to experimental, and is currently waiting in NEW.
2. The mighty seb128 will upload GTK+ 2.8 and Pango 1.10 to unstable RSN, so our first version of GTK using Cairo starts to get broadly tested in architectures other than i386 and powerpc.
3. Once dbus 0.60 is accepted in the archive, the GNOME team will rush to recompile GNOME 2.12.2 against this new dbus, and test that everything is ok with the new version.
   At the same time, the KDE camp will upload their shiny KDE 3.5 debs, compiled too against dbus 0.60, to experimental, for the first time.
4. When everything has transitioned to dbus 0.60 in experimental, GNOME and KDE will be uploaded to unstable.
5. Vorlon will take a deep breath and will try to figure out how to get the two monsters in testing at the same time. Vorlon, we love you. :)

This looks like it'll take months to do, but I really don't think it'll be the case. We hope to be ready for a full GNOME 2.12 upload to unstable, at long last, pretty soon. As always, the brave can still use GNOME 2.12 in experimental with the usual aptitude -t experimental install gnome-desktop-environment.

More updates as stuff happens!

What do you get if you mix religion and the military?