My lack of posts lately left Planet readers without yet another “yay, GNOME 2.20 released” post. I'm sure nobody missed it. However, I can report what's going on in Debian regarding its packaging.

The executive summary is: the GNOME team rocks, and having much of GNOME 2.20 available in sid on the very same day it was officially announced was possible thanks to the incredible work done by lool, Np237, slomo and other restless team members, who spent the summer tracking GNOME 2.19 releases and packaging them in experimental.

To get a better view on what's left to do, you can use the 2.20 status page, which you'll see shows lots of green at this point. Some of the outstanding blockers are gtksourceview and the new epiphany-webkit binary stuck in NEW, which block gedit and epiphany, and of course, the initial mess that the buildds need to sort out to get the dependencies installed. The rest of “red bits” will continue trickling in unstable in the next few days.

Beware of the new behaviour in control-center, which will by default use the DPI value provided by X. Some X drivers are still buggy and can provide bad values, which will cause bad font displays. If you're hit by this, you can force a DPI value in control-center, which should fix the issue. Also, you can read the relevant thread in our mailing list.

Enjoy 2.20!

Update: yeah, ftpmasters rock too, and epiphany hit incoming just a few hours after posting this entry. Yay ephy-webkit!