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:
- The Project Utopia people have uploaded dbus 0.60 to experimental, and is currently waiting in NEW.
- 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.
- 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. - When everything has transitioned to dbus 0.60 in experimental, GNOME and KDE will be uploaded to unstable.
- 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!
