So are we skipping a gnome release?

[Adam Williamson]

On Sat, 2014-01-25 at 19:14 -0600, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> On Sat, 2014-01-25 at 16:29 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > It sounds like gedit is the one change in
> > 3.12 that might catch people by surprise, so I think it's worth
> > considering making that part of 3.12 'opt-in' - by putting it in a
> > COPR
> > - if we can achieve that cleanly.
> It'll be the most user-visible, but there are lots of other applications
> that will feature significant changes. gitg, several games, File Roller,
> and GNOME Software all come to mind.

Given the user audience of gitg I wouldn't be _too_ worried about it
(and I think it's pretty inarguable that the new version is massively
better, right?). File-roller has basically just been converted to the
new style of menus, right? We already have a mix between converted and
not-converted apps in F20, and have for several releases, so I wouldn't
_expect_ one app being converted as part of an update to throw anyone
for a huge loop. I think Software is probably in the same bucket as
gitg, right, I don't think any of the changes are particularly
controversial/surprising, they just make things *better*, right? Still,
Software would be a component we should test very thoroughly and
carefully if we're going to go for a version bump.

> All apps will notice changes from the GTK+ and Adwaita upgrade. A good
> amount (probably a majority) of the complaints about the new gedit were
> actually only about the design of the tabs (which I think look
> excellent, but there's no denying they're very unpopular). Well, that
> wasn't a gedit change: it's going to happen during this update even if
> you hold gedit at 3.10.
> 
> I really do want to see this update happen: I think Fedora users will
> appreciate it, and I think it's justified by the exceptional change to
> the normal release schedule. But it'd be silly to pretend there won't be
> significant UI changes all over the place.

Thanks for highlighting the issues. I think the way forward would be to
take a proposal to FESCo - a really *good faith* proposal, highlighting
all the user-visible changes to to experience that it would involve, and
including a justification / consideration of the issues with changing
the user experience in unexpected ways with updates to stable releases -
and see where that goes. If FESCo signs off on the idea, we can take a
look at whatever restrictions/caveats they impose, and then deal with
the practical implementation questions: how should we do it, what if
anything should be hold back, if we hold anything back should we have it
optionally available in a COPR, how should we test it, and what should
the 'release criteria' be...
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
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