Mon, 05 Jul 2004

GNOME 2.6 in Sarge status update

I haven't posted about this in a while, mostly due to lack of news.

As it stands now, the biggest problem with the GNOME components in Sarge is gedit not starting, and the easies solution is still to hand-fix it. This is due to the big gnutls10 transition still being stalled. The biggest problem today is kdelibs, which is waiting for a qt3 build on m68k. Hopefully, with a bit of luck, this will be resolved soon and the release mages will be able to cast the spell that makes kdelibs, GNOME stuff, Samba, CUPS and others enter Sarge at once.

Another of the GNOME problems is the lack of gst-plugins0.8 in Sarge. This is stalling gnome-applets, gnome-media and a few more. The problem this time is jack-audio-connection-kit, which is missing an alpha build and a few days of wait. With lully up and running again (apparently), one hopes that jack will be ready to go soon, thus removing a good list of packages needed by meta-gnome in testing.

Speaking of meta-gnome2, I uploaded version 56 today, adding an alternative for mozilla-xft, which has been replaced by the normal mozilla build. Little after my upload, mozilla-browser was corrected to declare a Provides: mozilla-xft, but I guess it won't harm anyone to have the alternative there for a while.

My libgnetwork packages were accepted, but failed to build do to a compile warning on some arches mixed with the usage of -Werror. I'll fix soonish, hopefully.

I need to translate gstreamer. Maybe tonight.

17:08 | [] | # | (comments: 3)

Sorry if the following comes out as a flame, it's really not intended to be.

Now I know it's not your fault, or for that matter any single persons fault - but I thought testing was supposed to be relatively stable and thus not subject to such an amount of breakage that the GNOME 2.6 transistion caused.

Now I love Debian, it was my first real linux learning experience back 5 years ago, but it seems it's developers spend more time debating politics (not that it's not an important issue) than actually developing Debian and making use it's stable and current.

Are there any plans to amend futher problems of this manner - seriously I would like to go back to debian at some point, but if things continue to progress in a manner where only stable can be trusted, debian is no good for my desktop, since there aren't many releases (Woody is +2 years old now right?), and old software isn't all that much fun, or useful.

Posted by Lovechild at Mon Jul 5 18:07:37 2004

I can understand your frustration. I'm actually running Sarge instead of Sid at home to see how good or bad it is.

I hand-fixed gedit and stuff, and it's running quite well for me now, but I understand hacking around with apt sources whenever there's a major GNOME upgrade isn't expected by normal users.

Actually, the gnutls problem isn't something common,  because it implies that a large number of packages are in shape at the very same time so they can flow into testing. Unfortunately, we're having a bit of bad luck with the fixes, and when some of the major bits are ready, it's possible that some other breaks or gets new dependencies, so the whole process needs to wait.

I'm confident it'll be fixed soon. The release team has a lot of interest on having this boulder removed from the road to Sarge.

As to what caused this, well, there are many: the control-center SNAFU was caused by a bug in our packaging, ie, Debian's fault. The Gedit stuff isn't so nice though. The problem comes from the upstream authors, when they break the libeel API and don't declare it in the library. That causes that mixing a 2.4 app using libeel with a 2.6 libeel can break, as it does with gedit. One hopes this will be resolved upstream some day.

Posted by Jordi at Tue Jul 6 00:05:28 2004

My point was, do we need to rethink the testing method, so we can avoid this kind of thing in the future - maybe use experimental for a lot of the stuff that we use unstable for today, and then use unstable as a place where we gather bugs, and only move down complete changes to testing.

Because we can't allow a situation where debian users don't have a reasonable up to date distro, that's usable.. this past week or so, testing has been relatively broken for GNOME, I understand that the KDE people have similar problems - and unless we do something now, it will happen again.

Posted by Lovechild at Tue Jul 6 13:25:25 2004