Great. Please, let us know when GNOME 3.0/3.2 will be is Unstable.

Completely honest question, why is it so hard to package and integrate GNOME in Debian?

I know this is probably dumb question but what could i be doing wrong if i:

1) downloaded debian-testing-amd64-DVD-1.iso (26-Sep-2011)
2) installed it to hard drive (had to cope with grub manually as it failed to install, but that doesnt matter now)
3) added sid, experimental to /etc/apt/sources.list
4) did apt-get update
5) did apt-get dist-upgrade
6) checked that /etc/issue speaks about wheezy/sid
7) issued apt-get install -t experimental gnome
8) got lot of unmet dependencies (not going to be installed)

sorry to bother you, its most probably some stupid mistake from my side

The obvious first answer is lack of man power, but that isn't a huge problem right now in the GNOME team, thanks basically to 2 or 3 very motivated team members.

Secondly, in order to not break dependencies in testing, transitions are scheduled to ensure new stuff (for example, NetworkManager 0.9) and its dependencies flow into testing together. This means that you need to fix and upload dozens of packages at once and make sure all of them are fit (ie bugfree) to enter testing at the same time.

This is hard in the case of G2 → G3, as there have been many transitions involved: NM, libpanel, Nautilus, WebKit... although it has improved over the years, it's still a weak point of the Debian processes.

FYI, most of the very hard transitions are past us, and we're now waiting for a green light to tackle the last two: Nautilus, and Panel. Transitioning from 3.0 to 3.2 should be a piece of cake.

Guy, if you give me some contact info we can try to figure out...

I have specified my email this time. I hope it gets displayed for you.

pvanhoof@lors:~$ su -
Password:
lors:~# apt-get install -t experimental gnome
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree 
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
gnome : Depends: gnome-core (= 1:3.0+1) but it is not going to be installed
  Depends: gedit (>= 3.0) but 2.30.4-2 is to be installed
  Depends: shotwell but it is not going to be installed
  Depends: gedit-plugins (>= 3.0) but it is not going to be installed
  Recommends: browser-plugin-gnash but it is not going to be installed
  Recommends: gnome-games-extra-data (>= 3.0) but 2.30.0-1 is to be installed
  Recommends: telepathy-butterfly but it is not going to be installed
  Recommends: telepathy-idle but it is not going to be installed
E: Broken packages
lors:~# vi /etc/apt/sources.list
lors:~# cat /etc/issue
Debian GNU/Linux wheezy/sid \n \l

lors:~# apt-get dist-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree 
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
lors:~#

apt-get -t experimental install gnome3-session still works.

I have the same problem.


The following packages have unmet dependencies:
gnome : Depends: gnome-core (= 1:3.0+1) but it is not going to be installed
  Depends: shotwell but it is not going to be installed
  Recommends: nautilus-sendto-empathy but it is not going to be installed
E: Broken packages

rootannyong# cat /etc/issue 
Debian GNU/Linux wheezy/sid \n \l

You have to install evolution and python-gtk2 from unstable before installing gnome-core from experimental. 'gnome' also requires a few packages from unstable to be installed first.