Call for Help: gala + Pantheon DE on fedora 29+

[Fabio Valentini]

Hi everybody,

I am faced with a problem that's due to the update of mutter / GNOME to
version 3.30: The gala window manager - which is used by the Pantheon DE
(primary DE of elementaryOS) - is broken by the API bump from libmutter-2
to libmutter-3.

I reported this "issue" with the fedora mutter package on bugzilla:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1624999

The API changes are quite invasive, and it looks like upstream developers
(who are - rightly - focused on elementaryOS 5.0, based on GNOME 3.28,
right now) will take some time to get around to fixing gala with mutter
3.30:
https://github.com/elementary/gala/issues/303

This results in the unfortunate situation that right now, gala - and by
extension, the Pantheon DE - can't be installed on fedora 29+ due to broken
dependencies, and gala can't be rebuilt, because it's not compatible with
mutter 3.30 yet.

I wrote a blog post with more details on my website:
https://decathorpe.com/2018/09/04/call-for-help-pantheon-on-fedora-29.html

Basically, the gala upstream developers and I need some help from people
who are versed in vala to port gala to the new mutter APIs, or the Pantheon
DE will not be installable on fedora 29 at launch, and will probably be
removed from existing users' fedora installations on upgrading to f29.

Another possible short-to-mid-term solution would be to introduce a
mutter328 compat package on fedora 29 (along with necessary adaptations to
the mutter package), or to bundle mutter 3.28 with gala itself (since it's
the only package using mutter directly, apart from gnome-shell, AFAICT).
However, those paths would probably require quite some changes to mutter
code and build system (autotools).

Any help and / or guidance on how to deal with a situation like this is
greatly appreciated.

Fabio