Unity For Fedora (As in OpenSUSE or Arch)

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2012-01-27 at 06:28 -0500, Jaroslav Reznik wrote:

> Yeah, I know, of course. Just heard that time that some Red Hatters/
> Fedora guys ere going to work on it too. Now I'm checking the stuff 
> again, refreshing package reviews etc.
> 
> The truth is I gave it up due to completely non-distribution friendly
> approach in Unity upstream (aka no upstream tarballs, just Ubuntu
> packages...).

My take - at the time I was doing it, we were actually fairly close,
just got stalled on the nux package review and then I lacked time. I'm
not aware of anything that would completely roadblock getting Unity in
Fedora.

There was no need for a variant GTK+, at least when I was looking at it
(and to the best of my knowledge). The issue which required a patched
glib was also resolved, I believe. The remaining area where
non-upstreamed patches were 'required' wasn't really a requirement;
these were patches to support Ubuntu's libindicator indicators. Unity
will work without these, it's just not exactly as upstream intends the
experience to be.

As far as I'm aware, Canonical were reasonably good about proposing the
libindicator patches for upstream inclusion, but many upstream projects
- especially those that are part of GNOME - weren't exactly rushing to
adopt the patches. I think Canonical did try to implement libindicator
support as a plugin for apps with sufficently sophisticated plugin
frameworks, which obviously helps.

There may have been changes since the last time I looked at things, of
course.

Note that I only ever did this as a personal side project. Even though
I'm @redhat.com it's not a Red Hat project, it's not supported or paid
by RH. It also has no kind of 'official' standing within Fedora, it's
not like I proposed it as a feature and got anyone else to sign off on
it. I just upped and started packaging things, entirely on my own
initiative. I don't consider my efforts to have any more status than
anyone else's.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net