Upload of GNOME 2.8 to unstable

[Jordi Mallach]

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Hello,

The GNOME team have been talking about what the chances are of having
GNOME 2.8 uploaded to unstable since it was released upstream early in
September.

While two months ago we never consider this to be a real possibility for
various reasons (Sarge was going to freeze real soon at that time, GNOME
2.6 was rock solid in testing and it's not the smartest thing to ship
GNOME 2.x.0 versions in a stable release), today things have changed
enough that we need to reconsider.

GNOME 2.7/2.8 has been packaged and maintained up to date in experimental
for over 3 months, and at this point we believe it is release-quality
and ready to go to unstable and testing.

GNOME 2.8.1 has been released already, polishing the major bugs that
were found in 2.8.0, making it suitable for a Debian stable
distribution.

The GNOME team has shown signs of tiredness after too much time
maintaining two branches: most of the bug reports we get against the 2.6
packages are general GNOME issues that were addressed in GNOME 2.8 (most
notably the MIME system replacement), or stuff that isn't so trivial to
backport. After two major GNOME releases packaged as a team, we're
seeing how we're gradually losing interest because of this situation.

Debian users _are_ using GNOME 2.8, and while it's available in
experimental, it's a pain for them as there's no optimal way of
maintaining an up to date GNOME 2.8 dekstop easily unless completely
upgrading to experimental.

We'd be ok to stick to GNOME 2.6 in Sarge if it was frozen already, as
this would let us dump 2.8 in unstable, aliviating most of these
problems, but the reality is that there isn't a fixed freeze date yet.
We've tested upgrades and migrations, both complete and partial, from
2.6 to 2.8 and apparently everything is solid, so we'd like to get
permission to upload GNOME 2.8 to unstable, and try to get it in Sarge
as quick as possible.

If we get your OK to do the upload, my personal opinion is that once 2.8
is in unstable, it'd be difficult to not end up shipping with GNOME 2.8
in sarge, as the new shlibs will trickle to not-so-gnome-ish packages
like Firefox and so. Others may thing that it should be possible to work
as KDE packages are doing it. Again, I'm confident that it'll go
smoothly.

Thanks,
Jordi, on behalf of the GNOME team.
--=20
Jordi Mallach P=E9rez  --  Debian developer     http://www.debian.org/
jordi@sindominio.net     jordi@debian.org     http://www.sindominio.net/
GnuPG public key information available at http://oskuro.net/~jordi/

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