Ubuntu Unity has been ported to Fedora 17

[Nelson Marques]

> It would be better to think of this as a starting point for porting
> and to work out the packaging issue instead of an enduser consumable.
> Porting Unity outside of Ubuntu is not going to be easy for anyone.
> There's a reason why its not in Debian yet at all.

Jeff,

The GNOME:Ayatana repo was actually started by me somewhere in 2010;
My original goal was to test the port and improve my packaging. Since
the early days that Vincent Untz had made clear that it could never be
merged with mainline openSUSE because of unacceptable patches:

 1) The GTK stack required a lot of patching, which had been mainly
refused by upstream; Most likely GTK+ upstream knows better this issue
than me. I haven't contacted them, not even Federico. This patches
includes the 'Menu Proxy' patches and others. To build Unity (openSUSE
back then) at least 4 patches on GTK+ were required;

 2) XInput2 had to be supported also which involved a few more crazy
hacks on Xorg stack (at least if I remember correctly);

 3) Back in the day, ATI binaries (I use Intel nowadays, but back then
was running ATI with fglrx) were fixed in Ubuntu the rest of the
people were left to dry in the desert; So I never could really test it
properly.

 4) Back then GDM was also hacked, but this was related to backport
sessions features from GDM2 to GDM2;

 5) GNOME session required to be hacked because Canonical had changed
a lot, so in order for the indicators to shutdown the system and
reboot the system, you needed to patch gnome-session.

A lot of patching not accepted upstream was required back then. I have
then left the repository behind and ignored it for quite long as the
number packages was really increasing a lot (around 50 packages, many
of them hacked). I've ditched it as it was requesting too much from
me, and I couldn't handle it alone.

I've added a few maintainers that requested it and removed myself from
the repo maintainership; The main reason was because the repo will
become totally un-usable as it is now for any distro... I've stopped
working on it mainly because of the kind of things people are doing
now, crazy hacks (in my opinion it will lead to chaotic maintaining
issues).

>
> The contents of this particular repo are entirely unacceptable for
> submission into mainline Fedora. And that's fine..its an experimental
> repository.
> If the people working inside the repo are serious about moving forward
> further with the porting work and are interesting in getting the
> packaging fixed so its compliant I'm willing to help them with package
> reviews and recommendations on how to come into compliance with our
> policies.

Are you ready to accept patches on GTK+ and potentially on Xorg that
were declined from upstream? This should be your initial thoughts!

> At a minimum they'll have to figure out how to deal with vendor
> patchsets against the gnome packages. Either dropping the patches
> entirely and relying on stock gnome as we ship it.. or forking the
> gnome components and renaming them for Unity to require in such a way
> that a system can have both the unity stack and the gnome stack
> installed in parallel without conflict.

Forking anything will lead this to nearly unmaintainable unless you
have someone working fulltime on it ;)

All the previous are my personal comments; Though I don't really care
about this issue, I don't believe much has changed on how Canonical
does it's stuff. I wish all the best to the maintainers, because I
have really a nice idea on the pain such project is going to give :)

NM