Reconsidering the Gnome standing FFe

[Martin Pitt]

Scott Kitterman [2011-09-09  1:47 -0400]:
> The things that concern me aren't known issues, but I see FFes coming in as 
> recently as this week which are passed off as Gnome standing exception, upload 
> with no real review.  Since they aren't really core desktop components, I'm 
> not sure how much testing they'll get.

I guess you are alluding to the clutter/clutter-gst uploads? They are
indeed not part of our default install, but a good number of our
community contributors run GNOME shell instead of unity, and clutter
is a required component for that (and also some GNOME 3.2 components
like totem or empathy which we held back in main Ubuntu, but some
people run them from PPAs).

> I think the ideal solution would be to adjust the cycle for "P" back to more 
> like it was pre-10-10-10 (note: I want this for Kubuntu too).  If we could 
> align our feature freeze to Gnome's beta, then I think the standing exception 
> could be dropped with no harm.

Fully agree.

> If not, perhap standing Gnome exception up through our Beta 1.

Yes, that sounds like a reasonable compromise. When we update to new
versions we review the NEWS files anyway, as they often contain
important notes for packagers/API users, but we should do this more
systematically especially for side things like clutter.

> I was discussing "P" planning with Kate on IRC today and gave her the KDE 4.8 
> (what Kubuntu will use for "P") schedule.  If there is Gnome schedule 
> information for "P" (I guess 3.4?), it'd be good to get it on the table (if 
> it's not already) as she said she plans to work on "P" schedule next week.

The 3.3/3.4 schedule hasn't been determined by GNOME yet, but I think
we can expect not too much deviation from the 3.0 cycle:

  https://live.gnome.org/TwoPointNinetyone

I. e. API/Feature freeze at end of January, UI freeze mid/end
February, final release start of April.

Martin
-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)