this week i’m at uds with vuntz and andreas.
there was obviously a big announcement yesterday. enough people are commenting on that already, and i don’t have anything that i really want to add to that conversation.
on a more positive note, i want to mention something that was agreed during one of the desktop sessions yesterday morning.
based on a promise made by jono bacon that gnome-shell would be an absolutely first class citizen in ubuntu (just not included on the CD) and in response to the lessons learnt from the failure of “stracciatella gnome”, we proposed the creation of an environment variable. if set, it disables the effects of any ubuntu vendor patch to upstream components when those effects are related to gnome-shell vs. unity integration.
what this means is that you will be able to login to a gnome-shell ubuntu experience that works properly, without all of the applications assuming that they are trying to interact with unity.
i like the name GNOME_ME_HARDER, but i guess they’ll probably want to do something a little more boring.
the specific parameters of the promise that was made are as follows:
1. for new vendor patches, this “works with shell” functionality will be required in order for the patch to be considered functionally complete for inclusion.
2. for existing vendor patches, missing GNOME_ME_HARDER functionality will be considered as a bug. this means that issue will receive the same treatment as other bugs — it will be fixed if there is time, patches welcome, etc.