So are we skipping a gnome release?

[Adam Williamson]

On Sat, 2014-01-25 at 19:07 -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> Why not do the opposite and provide the old one as a copr?

That's a possibility too, but it doesn't seem to quite fit as well. It'd
be a good thing to diverge from the update policy as minimally as
possible, and the high-level intent of the update policy is 'don't
change things unexpectedly'. 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.

>  Splitting up the release in the premiere os distribution of gnome
> seems very wrong. It'd be like serving a chef's signature dish but
> swapping out one of her planned sides by default. Present the chefs
> vision on the menu and allow diners to arrange for substitutions as
> needed with their waiter. Mmm yum as a waiter.

Obviously that's the right thing to do when it's part of a new release,
but now we're talking about updating an existing Fedora release, we have
competing imperatives - 'keep GNOME as a glorious whole!' is one
imperative, but 'follow the Fedora policy (i.e. respect the principle
that updates shouldn't drastically change how things work)' is a
competing imperative. It seems reasonable to try and consider the best
balance of the two.

Having gedit 3.12 as 'opt-in' rather than 'opt-out' just seems to fit a
bit nicer to me - my instinct is that people will find "We're providing
GNOME 3.12 as an update, but gedit's behaviour is drastically changed,
so to be safe, we're leaving the old version of gedit by default so you
don't see an unexpected change - if you want the new version, grab it
here!" a better 'story' (I threw that one in just for you memo-list
readers ;>) than "We're providing GNOME 3.12 as an update, along with
the heavily changed gedit experience which may surprise you, if you are
unpleasantly surprised by the new gedit experience, once you're done
cursing at us as a bunch of morons who don't understand the concept of a
stable release, you can downgrade back to the old experience here!"

And, on a purely practical level, it's much cleaner from a packaging POV
to provide an older version in the repos and a newer version in COPR
than vice versa. If we put the older one in COPR, we'd have to do some
icky stuff with epochs to let you install it to 'supersede' the newer
version from the repos, I think.

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
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