Mon, 05 Jan 2004

Sorting the GNOME puzzle for Sarge

The Debian Installer folks get a lot of reports about GNOME being completely broken when they install Sarge. This is because tasksel pulls the "gnome-core" meta-package, which suppossedly would install GNOME 2.4, but on testing, gnome-core is still the GNOME1.x-based package, so people don't even get gnome-session installed.

meta-gnome2 isn't in testing yet because a lot of its dependencies aren't in either, for a variety of reasons. So far, we've faced a GNOME 2.2 -> 2.4 transition which got a bit more complicated than expected due to a libtool bug. Shortly after, Debian got compromised just when things looked bright. Then, the buildd's weren't running. Recently, gcc broke on mips/mipsel, and python2.3 broke completely, making most of our packages unbuildable. jack-audio-connection-kit and alsa-lib are also having problems to enter testing, and that's also holding a few chunks, but Kamion has a plan for aj to fix this.

I have posted a proposal for a mini GNOME freeze to debian-gtk-gnome, with a list of the current problems and what needs to happen.

In other news, Alioth is finally back, and I've been able to commit my pending stuff, and release gnome-mud 0.10.4a-1 to incoming. The ALSA Psychos moved their CVS tree to Alioth today, but we can't upload 1.0.0rc2 because it looks like upstream changed the build system and the tree refuses to clean now. That's our only pending issue, so if you're an Debian ALSA user and want to poke at it, you're more than welcome. :)