User:Jlaska/Draft3

This page is a draft only
It is still under construction and content may change. Do not rely on the information on this page.

General ideas/discussion intended to ensure a successful GNOME3 release in Fedora 15.

What is Success?

A successful GNOME3 and Fedora 15 release are defined as:

1. runs on a reasonable range of graphics hardware
2. offers a graceful fallback for the rest
3. has working controls for common things like keyboards, monitors, network, sound and power
4. all desktop applications work. 'core gnome' applications follow somewhat higher standards for integration and appearance, including
   • being ported to GTK+3
   • don't show status icons (http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Guidelines/MessageTray/Compatibility)
   • don't use parent-less dialogs (http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Whiteboards/SystemDialogs/Compatibility)
   • install hi-res icon that renders well in the shell overview
   • more information about app integration: http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/AppIntegration

Open tasks

1. graceful fallback - code is needed to gracefully handle the following scenarios ...
   • Insufficient hardware - the system hardware is known to not handle gnome-shell, and fallback mode is recommended
   • shell failure - The shell crashes or fails to start for an unknown reason, a suitable fallback should be offered instead

Where's the bug?
Are the above open tasks tracked in upstream bugzilla?

FAQ

General

When is the upstream decision made as to whether 2.91.x will become 3.0?

See http://live.gnome.org/action/edit/TwoPointNinetyone/ for the schedule

How is the upstream decision made as to whether 2.91.x will become 3.0? Is it dependent on blocker bug resolution, or release criteria?

Release readiness is monitored by the release team, based on information from various sources such as weekly blocker bug summaries (http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2011-January/msg00170.html), buildability (http://build.gnome.org), etc. There are no fixed criteria.

Where is the upstream GNOME3 blocker bug list?

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&bug_status=NEEDINFO&cf_gnome_target=3.0

If GnomeShell isn't considered ready by upstream, how will Fedora proceed?

??? (FIXME)

1. Fedora 15 slips until GNOME3 is ready
2. Fedora 15 ships GNOME3 in fall-back mode only (shell with metacity+panel)
3. Fedora 15 ships Fedora 14 GNOME
4. <your idea here>

Where can I find GnomeShell marketing plans for upstream GNOME and Fedora?

http://www.gnome3.org is the new GNOME 3 website

http://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/ThreePointZero has marketing plans

What testing (GNOME and Fedora) is planned for GnomeShell?

For GNOME development releases, see the schedule at http://live.gnome.org/action/edit/TwoPointNinetyone/. These get smoke-tested by the release-team and get some community testing as well. A considerable amount of testing comes in the form of having GNOME development versions in rawhide (currently 2.91.5). There are several Fedora test events scheduled to test various aspects of GNOME3 (see QA/Fedora_15_test_days)

Features

What happened to the Fedora 14-vintage GNOME shell favorites sidebar allowing selection+presentation of favorite applications and folders?

it was just an experiment that did not work out; it is not part of the final GNOME 3 design

How should multi-monitor support behave with GnomeShell in Fedora 15?

Currently, gnome-shell just treats any additional monitors as extra space to put windows in but otherwise more or less ignores them. When you go into overview mode, it only takes effect on one screen, the others are just left blank. There's nothing yet done to integrate the workspace model the Shell encourages with multi-monitor setups. There's a bug for this, but again, AFAICT no particular commitment to fixing it up before the 3.0 release. (This isn't actually much of a 'regression' compared to GNOME 2, which was similarly lax about doing much with extra screens, but it's the sort of thing people might expect GNOME 3 to have fixed).

There are some ways in which multi-monitor support is better in GNOME3 than in 2.x:

* On the secondary monitor, dragging the window to the top edge maximizes

* We have working configuration for primary monitors in the control-center display panel

We are also hoping to have working barriers in X soon, so that we can improve the situation when the 'hot corner' is at a shared edge.

Workarounds

What is the procedure to manually revert to fallback mode?

Fallback mode is just that: a fallback. Therefore it is not planned to have a manual 'choose your UI' UI. You can of course open the hood and rewire what gnome-session does in the files /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/gnome.session and /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/classic-gnome.session. Doing so might void your warranty...