Arch Linux

Dianoga

Member

Registered: 2009-01-24

Posts: 2

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Gnome 2.26 Discussion

This is not another thread asking when Gnome 2.26 will be released (though I am curious and looking forward to it). This is a thread trying to figure out why even asking about it results in short replies and closed topics. We know that releasing an upgrade to Gnome is a big job. We know it will be ready when it is ready. I think we are just hoping for a possible status update. Or some idea of how we can help make it ready.

I understand that everyone working on Arch is doing it in their free time and I appreciate that. Possibly to help stop people from asking about when it is coming, you can make a page/sticky/something with just brief status updates to let us know that work is progressing.

ise

Developer

From: Karlsruhe / Germany

Registered: 2005-10-06

Posts: 404

Website

Re: Gnome 2.26 Discussion

It's up to the maintainer to inform about the progress. Personally I see no need to maintain a website with status/progress information. The only thing you see would be a website with information about which package of gnome 2.26 was built. And if you have a website with percentage for example and it will stuck at ~80% everybody will ask why it stucks, etc.

If you want to know what is going on at our SVN, just subscribe to the arch-commits mailinglist (http://www.archlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/arch-commits). Every single commit of every single package will be send to you by mail and you know who is working on which topic or task.

To give a small status update: Jan is working hard on Gnome 2.26 and told me that he has finished 90% of the packages.

Last edited by ise (2009-03-23 14:28:19)

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Dianoga

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Registered: 2009-01-24

Posts: 2

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Re: Gnome 2.26 Discussion

Thanks for your excellent reply. I wasn't aware of the commits mailinglist.

To give a small status update: Jan is working hard on Gnome 2.26 and told me that he has finished 90% of the packages.

That is excellent and exactly what I was looking for.

Also, is there any way for users to help in the packaging process? If not with this release, then future releases?

ise

Developer

From: Karlsruhe / Germany

Registered: 2005-10-06

Posts: 404

Website

Re: Gnome 2.26 Discussion

Also, is there any way for users to help in the packaging process? If not with this release, then future releases?

I think not. The packaging of the official repository is maintained only by developers. You can test the packages after they hit the testing repo and file bug reports, if there are any.

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skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: Gnome 2.26 Discussion

Welcome to the forums Dianoga.

One thing that every user can do if they're willing is enable the testing repository in order to make sure the packages are sane. Parts of the new Gnome have been going into testing since the tarballs were released.

alex_anthony

Member

From: UK

Registered: 2007-09-25

Posts: 344

Re: Gnome 2.26 Discussion

I had a thought about this.
A group of users could start writing PKGBUILDs for the next version of GNOME earlier in the cycle. A lot of the time there won't be huge changes, and they particularly don't change much from beta to final release. We can submit them to AUR as *-devel. Then when it comes around for a dev to package them, he can see changes in dependencies etc and can check package quality (malicious commands etc), instead of having to find out why each package isn't building. Just taking a bit of the work off the devs

We could then try to get GNOME pkgs up on release day like KDE!

just a thought

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: Gnome 2.26 Discussion

I had a thought about this.
A group of users could start writing PKGBUILDs for the next version of GNOME earlier in the cycle. A lot of the time there won't be huge changes, and they particularly don't change much from beta to final release. We can submit them to AUR as *-devel. Then when it comes around for a dev to package them, he can see changes in dependencies etc and can check package quality (malicious commands etc), instead of having to find out why each package isn't building. Just taking a bit of the work off the devs

We could then try to get GNOME pkgs up on release day like KDE!

just a thought

KDE got ready in days because 4.0 and 4.1 were development releases. There was over a year of packages breaking constantly to get it release ready. We don't have that "luxury" with Gnome.

For everyone:

The fact is that Gnome 2.26 has been out for a week. History has shown that every upstream breakage will be blamed on Arch by some user or another (or 1000). If it takes 10 or 14 days to get into the repos, so what? ABS exists and adjusting PKGBUILDs usually isn't that difficult.

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: Gnome 2.26 Discussion

Oh yes,

alex_anthony, I think that your idea of a community driven Gnome testing area is a good one. I know that some people were running subversion builds for both KDE4 and XFCE4 before, but I'm not sure that it needs to be that extensive. The Gnome project releases development tarballs pretty frequently and on a schedule. If the goal is to get ready for a major release, the simplest way is to start building when tarballs are labeled .90 and up. For instance, I put evince-gtk in AUR when the development tarball hit 2.25.91. I started building at 2.25.90.

A pure development branch may work too. The only major issue that people may run into is that there are some pretty low level libraries that Gnome gets built against (glib2 for instance). One needs to be careful to rebuild other things that depend on those libraries.

Odysseus

Member

Registered: 2009-02-15

Posts: 141

Re: Gnome 2.26 Discussion

Will epiphany use webkit?

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ise

Developer

From: Karlsruhe / Germany

Registered: 2005-10-06

Posts: 404

Website

Re: Gnome 2.26 Discussion

Will epiphany use webkit?

No, it was delayed to 2.27 release. epiphany still use gecko in this release.

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Pierre

Developer

From: Bonn

Registered: 2004-07-05

Posts: 1,964

Website

Re: Gnome 2.26 Discussion

Funny, didn't they delay it on 2.22 and 2.24, too?

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Odysseus

Member

Registered: 2009-02-15

Posts: 141

Re: Gnome 2.26 Discussion

Will epiphany use webkit?

No, it was delayed to 2.27 release. epiphany still use gecko in this release.

Aww.  That's okay.  The epiphany-webkit package in AUR is oprhaned and I've been thinking about adopting it.  'Bout time I gave something back.

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sand_man

Member

From: Australia

Registered: 2008-06-10

Posts: 2,164

Re: Gnome 2.26 Discussion

Is it just me or does epiphany+webkit suck anyway?

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tjtag

Member

From: Odessa, Ukraine

Registered: 2009-02-21

Posts: 5

Re: Gnome 2.26 Discussion

evolution 2.26 is working well for me, from the tesing repo..good job devs...

steve-e

Member

Registered: 2007-10-03

Posts: 37

Re: Gnome 2.26 Discussion

Will epiphany use webkit?

No, it was delayed to 2.27 release. epiphany still use gecko in this release.

Aww.  That's okay.  The epiphany-webkit package in AUR is oprhaned and I've been thinking about adopting it.  'Bout time I gave something back.

Go for it!

viktor

Member

Registered: 2009-01-05

Posts: 3

Re: Gnome 2.26 Discussion

Is it just me or does epiphany+webkit suck anyway?

it does. it starts up slowly and freezes for seconds after each action taken

Last edited by viktor (2009-03-24 10:30:19)

linfan

Member

From: Stockholm, Sweden

Registered: 2004-04-23

Posts: 135

Re: Gnome 2.26 Discussion

Thanx for a wonderful thread.

I wonder if pulseaudio will be implemented in the archlinux release of gnome 2.26.

psych

Member

Registered: 2007-06-04

Posts: 19

Re: Gnome 2.26 Discussion

Thanx for a wonderful thread.

I wonder if pulseaudio will be implemented in the archlinux release of gnome 2.26.

A very interesting question... pulseaudio is really nice!!! But not well integrated in gnome 2.24 and Arch...

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wonder

Developer

From: Bucharest, Romania

Registered: 2006-07-05

Posts: 5,941

Website

Re: Gnome 2.26 Discussion

i think jgc has mention that if pulse audio is an optional depedency he wouldn't integrate in gnome.

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php? … 66#p516666

Last edited by wonder (2009-03-24 11:20:01)

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linfan

Member

From: Stockholm, Sweden

Registered: 2004-04-23

Posts: 135

Re: Gnome 2.26 Discussion

In http://news.softpedia.com/news/First-Lo … 7111.shtml I read:

First Look: GNOME 2.26
Includes hot new features and updated applications.
____

PulseAudio is now the default audio input/output framework. One of its most powerful features is the ability to control applications' volume independently. This tool is sure to be very useful in many scenarios. Furthermore, rerouting sound devices is now made in real time, thanks to plug-and-play support. And don't worry, if you still use GStreamer, its mixer is still available and received a new sound theme tab.
________

But I am too unexperienced to understand the width of pulseaudio - I guess the soundserver involves other than gnome apps as well.

But we'll see what will come :-)

praka123

Member

From: Kerala,India

Registered: 2008-03-04

Posts: 188

Website

Re: Gnome 2.26 Discussion

pulseaudio and low sound volume(especially HDA-Intel cards)  are an existing issue in most distributions.
there was  a patch awaiting upstream fixing this issue(hopefully) which may have been part of 2.6.29 kernel.

just for information purpose only

JGC

Developer

Registered: 2003-12-03

Posts: 1,664

Re: Gnome 2.26 Discussion

I had a thought about this.
A group of users could start writing PKGBUILDs for the next version of GNOME earlier in the cycle. A lot of the time there won't be huge changes, and they particularly don't change much from beta to final release. We can submit them to AUR as *-devel. Then when it comes around for a dev to package them, he can see changes in dependencies etc and can check package quality (malicious commands etc), instead of having to find out why each package isn't building. Just taking a bit of the work off the devs

We could then try to get GNOME pkgs up on release day like KDE!

just a thought

Good idea. We used to have that when I wasn't a developer: it was me who made those packages.
Now I'm a dev and maintain mozilla-*, xorg and GNOME. We already have xorg-server 1.6 sitting in testing, which had more priority than getting gnome 2.25.90 in the repositories.
Sometimes I have to make choices. Getting a GNOME beta release packaged was not high priority, users can wait for a week or two.

As for pulseaudio: I won't implement it. Adding pulseaudio to gnome-applets and gnome-settings-daemon means that pulseaudio is a forced dependency. If pulse isn't running, you won't have sound or volume control. I compiled gnome-applets with the gstreamer mixer and patched gnome-settings-daemon to use gstreamer instead of pulse for volume control using multimedia keys.

Last edited by JGC (2009-03-25 09:27:39)

jiu

Member

From: Auckland, New Zealand

Registered: 2008-05-03

Posts: 31

Re: Gnome 2.26 Discussion

As for pulseaudio: I won't implement it. Adding pulseaudio to gnome-applets and gnome-settings-daemon means that pulseaudio is a forced dependency. If pulse isn't running, you won't have sound or volume control. I compiled gnome-applets with the gstreamer mixer and patched gnome-settings-daemon to use gstreamer instead of pulse for volume control using multimedia keys.

Great news to me! I don't know much about how pulse audio is supposed to work but I really hate not having sound because of a buggy app. Maybe in a year's time it'll be worth putting back in. Thanks Jan

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: Gnome 2.26 Discussion

If JGC also likes the idea of a community sponsored test bed for Gnome stuff, then I think that a new discussion on just that subject would be a good thing. If some of you are interested, let's open up a new thread to get a clean start.

Berseker

Member

From: Near Lecco, Italy

Registered: 2008-04-24

Posts: 258

Re: Gnome 2.26 Discussion

I had a thought about this.
A group of users could start writing PKGBUILDs for the next version of GNOME earlier in the cycle. A lot of the time there won't be huge changes, and they particularly don't change much from beta to final release. We can submit them to AUR as *-devel. Then when it comes around for a dev to package them, he can see changes in dependencies etc and can check package quality (malicious commands etc), instead of having to find out why each package isn't building. Just taking a bit of the work off the devs

We could then try to get GNOME pkgs up on release day like KDE!

just a thought

Good idea. We used to have that when I wasn't a developer: it was me who made those packages.
Now I'm a dev and maintain mozilla-*, xorg and GNOME. We already have xorg-server 1.6 sitting in testing, which had more priority than getting gnome 2.25.90 in the repositories.
Sometimes I have to make choices. Getting a GNOME beta release packaged was not high priority, users can wait for a week or two.

As for pulseaudio: I won't implement it. Adding pulseaudio to gnome-applets and gnome-settings-daemon means that pulseaudio is a forced dependency. If pulse isn't running, you won't have sound or volume control. I compiled gnome-applets with the gstreamer mixer and patched gnome-settings-daemon to use gstreamer instead of pulse for volume control using multimedia keys.

gnome-applets and gnome-settings-daemon are the only two packages concerining the pulse-audio question?

I'd like to know because surely I'll de-patch them myself, as I'm using Pulseaudio for a while and I'm happy with it.

Btw I agree for this decision, in fact many people don't use already PA or they have some (big) problems with it.