On Wed, 21 Nov 2012 04:03:33 +0100 Michael Schmitt <tcwardr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > AFAIK is completely impossible that Debian ships MATE for Wheezy. Wheezy > > has been frozen time ago and by policy no new packages are allowed in > > the archive for testing during the freeze. > So much for the general rules... but exceptions ARE possible! And I just > try to make a case here about how important it might be! The case has been denied and closed. There will be no exception for any change anything like as large as MATE during a freeze. Adam has made that clear, Russ has made that clear. It was already too late the day that the freeze started. It would have taken many months of work to get MATE into a fit state for a stable Debian release. As part of the Debian release team it is Adam's call to make. He's declared his decision which is fully in line with the freeze policy and that's that. There is no point even thinking about MATE in Wheezy any longer. It's done, closed, ended - denied. Move along now, nothing to see here. > > What bothers me is that gnome3-classic will be deprecated with the next > > release of GNOME. I hope that MATE can make into Debian for Jessie. > I kind of insist it being in jessie ;) You've already said you're not into the programming / maintainer side of things. The way Debian works is that if someone wants something to happen, that person does the work and/or recruits other people to do the work. If the work isn't done by those who want the work done, it simply won't get done. Those who do not, will not or cannot do the work themselves are not able to insist on anything in Debian. It doesn't matter how much others complain - without someone to do the work, MATE will never get into any Debian release. I've switched to XFCE and I may well move on to KDE4 but I will not work on MATE in Debian. I wouldn't ever work against it but if someone else does the work, I will require that MATE meets all the requirements and expectations of Debian and that includes ongoing competent maintenance within Debian, not just upstream. One of my big problems with old, stale, code like MATE is that I've always been pushing for cross-build support / bootstrapping support across all of Debian. I know the libraries in MATE, I developed upstream code using them, I cross-built all of them for Emdebian Crush and some of them are truly atrocious bits of code. I was *very* glad when libgnomeui and bonobo were deprecated, amongst others. I only wish the migration to GNOME3 would have pleased more upstream developers because then Debian could have dropped all the shoddy GNOME2 underpinnings. There is still a lot of good stuff which was part of the GNOME2 environment but that's why XFCE is a good choice for most of those who don't like GNOME3. XFCE is, largely, the good bits of GNOME2 without the horrors. It's not perfect but it is what most people who found GNOME3 unsuitable have ended up using. We have what we have, I have no desire to work on that code any more, despite being upstream for several projects which used to rely upon it. I took that code out, I did the work - I would NOT be happy to see it coming back and contaminating my fixed code. Sadly, IMHO, fixing the problems of the bits of GNOME2 which aren't XFCE would seem to be a pointless and thankless task. I wouldn't recommend anyone to do it. Complaints do not matter one jot. Unless someone does the work, MATE will never get into Debian, whether for Jessie or Jessie+1. There will not be MATE in Wheezy as that boat sailed months ago. I'm not sorry about any of this, it's the reality and I don't see that Debian needs to apologise about it. The work was not done in time, so the results are not available for release. End. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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