As people have been asking for news on the semi-disaster, here we go.

Things haven't really improved in the last week. gnome-control-center 2.6 hasn't entered testing yet, but is abou to do so. We're just missing a mips build, which has already been done by the buildd, so hopefully it'll appear in incoming in one or two days. Another of the problematic packages, gnome-applets, is in bad shape, as it hasn't been built in some architectures due to a bug in sgml-base, completely out of the control of the GNOME team. We hope this will be resolved soonish and builds start so succeed after that. There's another problem in the current set of GNOME packages in Sid, as gedit refuses to start now that libeel is at version 2.6. This is due to API breakages in eel which are not well handled upstream with soname bumps. This bug has been reported multiple times, and the bug has been forwarded upstream, but the upstream maintainers don't intend to maintain API compatibility in eel at all. They claim it's a private library in nautilus, but reality is that it's used in epiphany, control-center, abiword and others. (don't read this as a rant, I'm just trying to describe the situation). The easiest way of fixing this problem in Debian is to add unstable sources to apt, install the unstable version of gedit (2.6.x), which will pull new cupsys, libgnomeprint, kdelibs4 (if you have it installed) version. Then remove unstable again from your sources, and you'll end up having a working gedit.

On a unrelated note, those who want to play with GNOME 2.7.x can do so by upgrading to experimental. Some GNOME folks have started packaging it.