Unity For Fedora (As in OpenSUSE or Arch)

Jef Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Thu Jan 26 19:15:09 UTC 2012


On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 8:21 AM, Lars Seipel <lars.seipel at googlemail.com> wrote:
> The last I heard from the Arch packaging efforts was that Unity won't be an
> officially supported package until it no longer depends on non-upstream patches
> to GTK+ and friends.
>
> The same seems to be true for OpenSuse:
>> Since we're replacing some of the core components of openSUSE (ex: GTK+,
>> gnome-session) the priority is important.
> (pasted from your link)
>
> I don't think I'm going out on a limb if I say that this doesn't look like
> Unity will hit Fedora repos anytime soon. You may look at
> repos.fedorapeople.org, though.

required patches to gtk and core gnome components that are not
acceptable to upstream are basically a non-starter.  It maybe possible
to get some variant of Unity packaged and operational without those
patches. But such a version might suffer some operational loss compare
to the one offered by Ubuntu. I'm not sure its in anyone's best
interest for us to offer a version we know is crippled just to say we
were offering it at all. I don't think that's fair to users nor to the
developers. And I'm not particularly thrilled when I see other
distributors making the choice to ship crippled variants of
competitor's offerings, so I wouldn't want Fedora to do it.

The reality is,  Unity and its Canonical developed dependency stack is
not designed our constructed as a distribution neutral offering.
Canonical has made some choices in how these bits of code are
developed that assume tight integration with the Ubuntu distribution
specifically, making it difficult for any other traditional
distributor to include it as an offering without make some sort of
special exception in some regard. It's not even in Debian yet in any
capacity and that should speak volumes right there. If Unity was
constructed as a neutral upstream project, it should be very easy for
Debian to scoop it up and make small changes to the existing packaging
and rebuild it..as a reversal of the more common approach on how
Ubuntu merges from Debian. But it hasn't happened, and its not clear
when it will happen. I would find it deeply amusing and highly ironic
if Fedora or OpenSuse got officially maintained packages up and
running in official repos ahead of Debian.

That being said, I'll cheerfully review any new packages needed to get
Unity packages into Fedora. Just ping me.

-jef


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