GNOME2 support revisited

[T.C. Hollingsworth]

On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 4:00 PM, Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com> wrote:
> What did I say which in any way referenced RHEL7? We are running Fedora on our
> support machines (not the servers) and my question was pretty specific as to
> FC17 being the issue, so we can get off FC14.

Sorry, I thought you were talking about RHEL in that paragraph.

> I take it that "feel free to do it yourself" is a polite way of saying no, I
> can't imagine anyone here doing the port with no assurance that it would be
> accepted.

No, it's the polite way of saying "feel free to do it yourself, as
that's the only way anything gets done in a volunteer project".

The only two issues I'm aware of with packaging a GNOME 2 fork for Fedora are:
 - Infringement of GNOME Foundation trademarks.
 - Compatibility with the GNOME 3 stack in Fedora.  (ensuring that it
doesn't trample on it, etc.)

MATE appears to take care of both of those issues, though admittedly I
haven't looked at it thoroughly.

The only things required to get something into Fedora are:

 - a suitable RPM package pursuant to the Packaging Guidelines [1]
This should be really easy, as the F14 RPMs should be able to be used
as a starting point with minimal changes (changing the name, tarball
location, etc.).

 - a packager willing to do the work to rename and convert the old
GNOME 2 RPMS to FATE and submit them for inclusion

 - a sponsor willing to review it and assist the new maintainer
Given the amount of griping GNOME 3 has evoked on this and other
Fedora lists, it shouldn't be difficult to find others interested in
helping with a well-maintained GNOME 2 fork.

MGSEs would be even easier as there are already lots of GNOME Shell
extensions in the repo, and they're just bits of Javascript that
should be simple to package.

-T.C.